J 




Class / ■- ) h fj f<'> 
Rnnk ^^-- ^r 71 U 
GoipgtitN?__/;gi_^' 



COPVRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



DEPRECIATIONS 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/depreciationsOOhert 



DEPRECIATIONS 



^ -^""^ 



B. RUSSELL HERTS 



NEW YORK 
ALBERT & CHARLES BONI 
1914 



^\ 



r 






Copyright, 1914 
By 
Albert & Charles Boni 






SEP 16 1915 



To Edward Goodman 
my friend 



Certain of the following essays have ap- 
peared in The Forum, The Independent, The 
International J Moods, The Book News 
Monthly, The Medical Review of Reviews, 
The New Age (London). 



CONTENTS i 

I 

PAGE 

Explanation 9 

The Import of the Superficial 1 1 j 

Little Arnold Bennett 17 ■ 

Art and Affectation 27 1 

The Shadowy Mr. Yeats ^^ i 

George Moore the Mundane 4I 

The Fetich of Sincerity 59 J 

G. K. Chesterton: Defender of the 

Discarded 65 

A Visit to G. K. C 87 

A Visit to H. G. Wells 93 j 

The Tragedy of the Finalist 105 ! 

Pinero the Punctilious 109 j 

Jottings in Europe 115 | 

The Tired Business Man ....^ 151 

The Unmarrying Modern Male 159 

The Kingdom of this World 165 i 



EXPLANATION 

Some of these essays were written before 
this volume was contemplated, but almost all 
are aimed at a revision of accepted values. 
They are given their collective title of Depre- 
ciations because the people and ideas depre- 
ciated are all, in my opinion, ones overvalued 
by our generation. 

I do not imagine that I have cut in pieces 
either the one or the other. This book is 
a sword-thrust that may, indeed, be no more 
than a pen-prick. Moore, Yeats, Bennett, 
Wells, Chesterton and the rest remain impos- 
ing, and so I recognize them; marriage, reli- 
gion, the effort at fundamentalities and finali- 
ties, these too remain important to humanity. 
I have merely given expression to my present 
personal reaction to them; I may feel differ- 
ently in a year — and then there may be another 
book for you to read. 

But for the moment I offer only these essays 
as an offensive and defensive expression of 
my opinion, and I hope they may provoke a 
corresponding activity on the part of those who 
cannot accept them; for by such encounters 
the truth, or as much of it as is necessary for 
us at any one time, comes to prevail. 

B. R. H. 

20 West 57th Street, New York. 

9 



THE IMPORT OF THE SUPERFICIAL 

The world has become noisy with f undamen- 
talities. Everywhere we see little people strut- 
ting about looking for the bottoms of things. 
Folk whose fathers were content to dabble 
around in their own particular set of stupidi- 
ties without speculating much further than the 
following Saturday's payroll are now discuss- 
ing problems and movements and fundamental 
things generally. 

Dissatisfaction with things as they exist is 
pretty general and the little people have started 
out to adjust it and bring to solution the dif- 
ficulties of the ages. The expense in good 
black ink and good heavy paper to which the 
world has been put to publish the panaceas of 
perplexed nonentities has never been so great 
as it is to-day. The stage is largely occupied 
by puerile problem plays while the press is 
compelled by popular demand to dispense still 
more puerile propaganda articles. The cults 
and the isms are thriving and any one can 

11 



12 DEPRECIATIONS 

start a movement who has six personal friends, 
a studio and a touch of paranoia. 

So we have all these little people roving the 
realms of sociology, science, philosophy and 
morals, with big black spectacles fastened to 
their craning faces and geological hammers 
ready to knock off projections everywhere on 
our later half-petrified formations, and to get 
down to what they expect will be bed rock. 
We hear it said that there is no movement 
that has not its usefulness; and, indeed, the 
Theosophists, the Single Taxers, the Eugen- 
ists and the Cubists, with all the hundred other 
manifestations of desire for better things in 
each of their fields, each and all have their 
degree of merit and worth. They are valu- 
able for one thing particularly, and that is for 
showing a tendency of the age. It is a com- 
plex, disintegrating tendency, for each one 
drives (or carries, if one feels favorably in- 
clined) in a different direction. 

There is something, however, that is com- 
mon to all of them, and that is that they seek 
the basic fact of existence, the fundamental 
remedy of error as they see it. The typical 
Socialist is obsessed with the idea of employing 



THE IMPORT OF THE SUPERFICIAL 13 

economic power; the Christian Scientist is 
equally obsessed with the use of spiritual pow- 
er; the Physical Culturist is dominated by the 
desire to create physical prowess; the Futurist 
is determined to discard the conventions of the 
past; while the thorough-going Anarchist 
would let everybody do just about as he pleases. 
One might be a follower of almost all the 
movements, and then one would be a funda- 
mentalist with a vengeance. 

That would be the most admirable and de- 
sirable type of human being were it not for 
the fact that there are elements in existence of 
the greatest import that are not within the 
scope of any labelled movement. There is a 
certain calm thoughtfulness and generally pro- 
gressive tendency common to all genuine and 
intelligent people that is neither dominated nor 
dominating. It simply persists aside and in 
spite of the violent outbursts of propagandists. 
Contemplation is one of its considerable ele- 
ments and tolerance is one of its chief effects. 
The lackeys of new creeds look upon it as a 
superficiality. Its possessors are not spouting 
such a volume of water as the more radical 
whales and so they seem to be sailing in shal- 



14 DEPRECIATIONS 

low seas. Really, it is never lack of courage 
that keeps them on the surface: it requires 
sublime courage not to be an intellectual diver 
to-day — the epithets of the seekers of the bot- 
tom are so violent. 

What strikes one most forcibly about the 
habitues of causes is their intellectual ugliness. 
Generally rasping, their thinking on all sub- 
jects is crude and perverted. They possess 
power, but it is the power of a very lumbering 
elephant who can not manage itself when it 
gets into steep places. If the road is blocked 
with petty opposition it can knock its objectors 
over and proceed ; but on a free yet rocky path 
it rolls about from side to side and may even 
turn a few somersaults on the way. 

The man whom the propagandists deem su- 
perficial is saved from these mildly ungraceful 
proceedings. He is commonly supposed to do 
little more than save himself in this fashion. 
In reality he goes down the ages as the trib- 
unal before whom all causes and all movements 
and all propaganda are tried. His is the judg- 
ment that will not perish. In art he furnishes 
taste to posterity. In science he supplies the 
undiscredited facts of the future. He is the 



THE IMPORT OF THE SUPERFICIAL 15 

backbone of the generations; and while diffi- 
cult to characterize, he is thoroughly recog- 
nizable, and decade after decade he goes on 
being born, growing in thought fulness and tol- 
erance and reserve force, and coming to act as 
the great creative modifier of opposed vio- 
lences. He represents the most attractive type 
and the most important, and through him 
man's lasting and permanent progress must 
come. 



LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 

Mr. Bennett is always positive and some- 
times right. And this occasional truthfulness 
is one of his chief evils, for it bolsters his 
assurance and makes his positiveness unshrink- 
ing. He has become an absolutist par excel- 
lence, and his contradictions are as firm as 
his original assertions. For example, in 
How to Live on Twenty- four Hours a Day, 
he assures us that "there is no such man as the 
average man" and that "every man and every 
man's case is special.'' Yet on the page be- 
yond he talks of "his" typical man and to the 
average he addresses himself constantly. The 
assumption of mediocrity on the part of all 
men is the first essential to belief in his preach- 
ing. In a particularly unpregnant epigram we 
are exhorted to attempt a petty success because 
"nothing fails like failure." Yet who but the 
"average" man regards a small accomplish- 
ment as worthier than a mighty aspiration ? 

And this is the book of which we learn that 
"scarcely any of the comment has been ad- 
verse," excepting some objections to its frivol- 
ity ! Why, in the name of reason and original- 

17 



18 DEPRECIATIONS 

ity, has no one objected to its seriousness — 
the seriousness with which are tittered the 
platitudes of the ages, uttered with apologies, 
it is true, but none the less passionately? 
Here is a man in the twentieth century insen- 
sible to the fact that positive assertions become 
untrue the moment they are made, that the ab- 
solute is unapproachable and that middle-class 
finalities feed nothing today but our ruinous 
optimism. 

Of the great gravities of life he is unaware. 
He is all for the day to day efficiency. He ur- 
ges men to read imaginative poetry in the same 
spirit (and paragraph) as he recommends Ep- 
ictetus. Not a word is there of creative ardor, 
not a suggestion of those soul-stirring cur- 
rents that carry men to supreme accomplish- 
ment. Half an hour of ''concentration/' 
ninety minutes every other day of ''serious 
reading" — these are his offerings to spirits 
speeding toward eternity. We are human ma- 
chines capable of forming literary taste and 
mastering mental efficiency. There is the 
Alpha and Omega of the Bennet doctrine. But 
some of us are without the taste or the effi- 
ciency, and these, for some reason, he finds 



LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 19 

more interesting to write about; so we have 
novels and plays of folk not possessed of his 
''pocket philosophies/' 

Imagine if they were! Conceive The Old 
Wives' Tale told of people who were follow- 
ing the concentration exhortation ! Fewer con- 
temporaries would be readers. Yet through- 
out this best of his books and down from it 
to his silliest play, we find the same calm in- 
sistence on monotony. It is all just one thing 
after another — as someone described life it- 
self, forgetting the splashes of orange that 
are thrust in everywhere on the gray-greens 
and dull-blues of existence. From the pinnacle 
of our last hour, life may look like an undulat- 
ing plain, but we experience it as filled with 
dark caverns and dangerous seas and vast, 
unassailable mountains. 

And so Arnold Bennett's books are not true 
for us. We do not learn from their calm ac- 
ceptance of the bourgeois virtues. Their sin- 
cerity is obvious, but that does not make them 
true. Yet they come from a man of undoubted 
insight and imagination — insight into all but 
the deep, blinding forces of life, imagination of 
all but the sweeping passion and the surging 



20 DEPRECIATIONS 

hates and fears and loves of men. 

The novels are books without shadows — 
and therefore without highlights. When 
anyone dies there is scarcely a ripple of dis- 
comfort among the living. And thus it is in 
many of our lives : we lose father and mother 
and sister and brother and countless friends, 
and we surmount every loss because we are 
left dazed. But most of us are almost always 
dazed. We do not know why we are here, 
where we are going, or what will happen to 
us tomorrow, and we have quite forgotten the 
day before yesterday. It is only in the rarely 
vivid moments of the usual person that he re- 
members the past, or senses the present keenly, 
or imagines or forsees the future. Yet these 
moments have been the substance of art since 
writing began, and some great artists have pic- 
tured them immortally, even when they were 
happening to every day men and women. So 
it is not very fairly descriptive to announce 
Mr. Bennett as a remarkable realist, because 
he skims over the years instead of dwelling on 
the quarter hours. The years whirl by in a 
dream; the minutes are vivid as a lightning 
flash. Both are real enough indeed; they are 



LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 21 

opposite methods of looking at the same mat- 
ter. In a measure, they represent different 
ways of accepting experience: the one, the 
silent soporific method of the mid- Victorian 
old-maid ; the other, the deep-seated, vigorous, 
fearless method of the creator of all times. 
From a point of God-like aloofness, neither 
may be the greater, but art has always con- 
cerned itself with the latter, and to the pet- 
ulant spirits of this age, the latter must be 
vastly more interesting. 

We may not be precisely petulant today. That 
pictures us of this generation as distinctly dis- 
agreeble inheritors of this generously amus- 
ing planet. But we are deeply stirred, we are 
turbulent, the thoughtful, the sensitive among 
us. Life appears to us at many points as a 
greatly wasted treasure, and we hope for ex- 
tensive readjustments that may bring us down 
to a better basis so that all may have more of 
the fundamental values. We are uneasy 
among the fumblings and futilities of our lead- 
ers, and most of us are avid for suggestions 
from that salt of the earth, the writers whom 
men acclaim great. 

Therefore it is, that when a man so hailed as 



22 DEPRECIATIONS 

Arnold Bennett appears so puerilely uncog*" 
nizant of the trembling forces of his time, the 
judicious grieve. 

It is not essential that one should be a pro- 
mulgator of programs like Wells or Shaw; 
that is admittedly not the primary function of 
the novelist. There are greater men who have 
to offer no solutions, men like Galsworthy and 
Hardy and gentle tingling Meredith. These 
are fervent with subtlety and tremulous with 
suggestion, and that robs them of appeal to a 
number of thousands. No doubt the man of 
everyday detests no single factor quite so much 
as this suggestiveness, accompanied by any- 
thing that is subtle. He certainly eschews it 
conversationally and in plays it dances past his 
ears. It seems untruthful to him, insincere. 
He must have his laugh and his cry labelled for 
him — and his lecture, too, which might sen- 
sibly be marked 'Toison — do not touch." 
When Shaw misleads him he becomes pro- 
voked; when Galsworthy sets him down in 
doubt, he is horrified. But with his good 
brother Bennett he can feel at home : when it's 
a novel he buys he can be positive that he will 
have simple story from beginning to end ; when 



LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 23 

it's a tract, he can settle down, with a smack 
of the lips, to a solid, self-respect-creating task, 
at the end of which he can feel quite sure that 
he possesses all he needs to know about the 
subject. 

Mr. Bennett knows how to do these things, 
for he can write. He knows how to group 
words and to fetch down rapping sentences. 
He can throw the simple-hearted reader into 
glorious gusts of easily-explainable laugh- 
ter, he can produce the tremor, the sigh, the 
expectant hush, the scurrying ardor to be at 
the end. That is because he has a great and 
mighty skill. But he cannot inspire the 
thoughtful and he cannot enchain the reflec- 
tive and he cannot lead one to vast heights 
of emotion. That is because he has not a great 
and mighty soul. 

The remaining criticisms follow directly 
from this situation. Mr. Bennett's skillfulness 
succeeds in massing small detail and still pre- 
serving an atmosphere throughout the recital. 
His soullessness succeeds in making that recital 
a remarkably flat and uninspiring affair. Even 
so well executed a piece of humor as Buried 
Alive is more refreshing ten pages from the 



24 DEPRECIATIONS 

beginning than as many lines from the end. 
We are easily sated with monotony, even when 
it is monotony at an unusually high pitch. And 
we cannot feed our minds forever on the blood- 
less characters of an unimpassioned brain. 
They are actual enough, assuredly, these whim- 
sical folk of the Bennett books, except for their 
lack of the sweeping moments that make a 
commonplace existence endurable, and that 
arise when passion or ambition or hatred or 
some other feeling overwhelms the petty man. 
The Bennett business folk are so unbelievably 
petty that they are never overwhelmed — or 
must one say so normal, since a book that de- 
scribes the ecstasies of life is inevitably erotic 
or neurotic or something or other that the roy- 
alty-paying readers do not like ? No, for good 
substantial returns trust to the clammy desex- 
ualized character. If you restrain yourself in 
this regard you may describe the smallest func- 
tion of your individuals with the most complete 
waste of time or space or writing materials, 
and a waiting public will read. But the thor- 
oughly human is thought degenerate in Eng- 
land and America and books that deal with it 
have a sudden sale that dies almost at once. So 



LITTLE ARNOLD BENNETT 25 

if you are an efficient business man of litera- 
ture, you avoid such disasters by being as true 
as you can in an adjoining field, out of harm's 
way. 



ART AND AFFECTATION 

All people are endowed by nature with cer* 
tain methods and mannerisms of speech and 
movement. The conscious alteration of these 
attributes is called affectation. The term is 
used, however, in general as one of reproach 
and so when the onlooker approves of the par- 
ticular method of distorting the observed one's 
"natural*' characteristics, the latter is not said 
to be affected. Thus, for example, if a man 
"naturally" had a tendency to suck his thumb 
continually in public or to scratch the sole of his 
left foot, or to kick one of his heels high in 
the air whenever he was pleased, and if this 
same picturesque individual m.anaged to rid 
himself of these habits, the average observer 
would not call such a good riddance an affecta- 
tion. If, however, a man has a harsh, unpleas- 
ant voice and he manages to turn it into a 
modulated tuneful one, or if he finds the move- 
ments of the average male ungraceful and he 
manages to make his own more effective, he is 
immediately liable to be termed an affected 
person. This generally happens because the 
other folk in his particular community are un- 

27 



28 DEPRECIATIONS 

used to the kind of voice in which he speaks 
or to the type of movements which he has 
trained his body to perform. 

It is perfectly obvious that all forms of affec- 
tation are the product of an exercise of will 
power and their growth must therefore be co- 
ordinate with the growth of self control. An 
uncontrolled person cannot be an affected one. 
Moreover, affectation requires the observation 
of one's own mannerisms and the comparison 
of one's own with other people's, together with 
a wholesome self-disparagement as one of 
the results of the comparison. If this were 
not so the person would never be affected, for, 
failing to observe the superiority of any other 
form of discourse or motion, it would never oc- 
cur to him to approximate his own to any ob- 
served form. We have, then, in affectation also 
an exhibition of keen desire for self-improve- 
ment. 

With the practice of affectation bolstered by 
this tremendous galaxy of excellent qualities 
essentially connected with it, it seems scarcely 
necessary to utter any further defense, but 
when we examine the process a little further 
we find that it is very closely bound up 



ART AND AFFECTATION 29 

with that most valuable asset of human exist- 
ence, the genuine expression of personality. 

Examine the authors who are supposed to 
be affected: men like Oscar Wilde, Bernard 
Shaw, Gilbert K. Chesterton and George Mere- 
dith. They are invariably the writers with a 
distinctly personal style. They are in each case 
the men whose work accurately and profoundly 
reflects their own individuality and whose ex- 
pression and ideas are in complete accord. The 
''naturar' writers are practically without style 
and nothing but their supreme genius has been 
able to succeed in spite of this very serious de- 
fect — in fact, we never hear of a natural writer 
unless he happens to be a great genius such as 
Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Goethe and Homer. The 
smaller men fall by the wayside unless they 
turn the expression of their thoughts into an 
individual form, and to the extent that they do 
this they are supposed to be affected. The same 
thing is true in graphic art : Turner, Whistler 
and Beardsley being affected, and Rembrandt, 
Hals, and Michael Angelo being supreme 
enough to have succeeded without a deeply self- 
expressive style. 

Your typical fat-head is no contemned crea- 



30 DEPRECIATION 

ture of affectation. He is far too lazily self- 
satisfied to tax himself with any alteration in 
his natural qualities. Likewise your gratified 
matron, who, having captured her legitimate 
prey, settles down to a living of scandal-mon- 
gering, rich food and bridge whist — she is not 
concerned with the addition to her personality, 
of the graces and kindlinesses of life. Who, in- 
deed, are your affected poseurs, but the most 
talented, the most cultured, sophisticated, 
thoughtful, brilliant and suggestive members 
of your acquaintance? 

It requires considerable will power to act out 
an affectation to its inevitable conclusion of be- 
coming an authentic piece of self-expression. 
Persuade a weakling to attempt this and he will 
generally fail, but his will power will improve 
under the effort. Induce a thief to affect hon- 
esty and he will end up as virtuous as you 
please. "Become what thou art'' is an ideal; 
*^become what you affect," a reality. 

One of the iconoclastic onslaughts of this 
generation must be directed against the preju- 
dice of the unthinking regarding the valuable 
and very social art of affectation. Without this 
we should have no conscious advances in per- 



ART AND AFFECTATION 31 

sonality, no growth of self-control. We must 
not condemn even a poor exhibition, or not any 
more strongly than we do an inferior work in 
painting or literature. In such cases our func- 
tion as appreciative critics is to demand im- 
provement. We are all in a state of "becom- 
ing" and only he who stagnates can be com- 
pletely consistent or supremely sincere. 



THE SHADOWY MR. YEATS 

Slow and sure seems the forte — or may one 
say the piano? — of Mr. Yeats. On the mstru- 
ment of his talent the sonatas he plays are soft 
and melodious. Compared to the poetic sym- 
phonies of Masefield, the work of Mr. Yeats 
is that of a veritable MacDowell. And this is 
high praise; for MacDowell, despite his cruel 
suppression by the brutal president of Colum- 
bia, composed with surety and success — that 
is, with beauty. 

That Mr. Yeats' poems have something near 
to beauty in them is almost the first thing one 
feels the need to say of them; that this presence 
is not always that of beauty itself, is the second. 
So often it is merely the atmosphere of beauty, 
the hypnotic influence of the expectation of 
beauty; for always we are lead by Mr. Y'eats 
to expect, continually and everlastingly, beauty 
of the first order. In a way, his claim to beauty 
is like the claim to seriousnesss of a writer of 
ponderous prose, resounding with profound 
phrases, some book of pseudo-science by a 
man who knows not how to be simple: the 
matter of the book may be the merest bun- 

33 



34 DEPRECIATIONS 

combe but it persuades us of its seriousness 
by its size and ponderosity. So Mr. Yeats 
seems always to be telling us, as we turn his 
pages, "This poem or this play is going to 
be beautiful, very, very beautiful," and cer- 
tainly the atmosphere of the thing invariably 
calls up beauty; but, examining the lines, we 
find that those actually of rare and wondrous 
quality are few. 

Perhaps this is because the work is comatose. 
It is, at least, unstirring in a high degree. There 
is something soporific about it, and although 
we may admit that bed is a beatific place, we 
do not desire our poets to drive us there. Nor 
is this sleepyness to be explained by reference 
to Mr. Yeats' obvious mysticism. Many a mys- 
tic besides Jesus has been a stirrer up of the 
spirit. It is, perhaps, because the slow-moving 
calm of religiosity is what his mind requires. 
He happens to be a Protestant but he has the 
soul of a Catholic, as Chesterton, who happens 
to acclaim the Catholic belief, is temperamen- 
tally a typical Protestant. 

Mr. Yeats' mysticism is unalive. He writes 
of life as if it were death, and of death 
also — wherefore these latter descriptions are 



THE SHADOWY MR. YEATS 35 

strangely adequate and ghastly. But man 
does not live by death alone, nor, in- 
deed, at all, and we cannot dwell indefinitely 
in a world of ghosts without disturbing our di- 
gestions. Mr. Wells may tell us all he pleases 
that stomachic difficulties are essential to good 
writing; we are not all writers (thank the 
Lord!) and surely some part of Mr. Yeats' 
readers still hope for something from him be- 
sides death-smitten heroes possessed of strange, 
uncarnal appetites, maids married to the grave 
before their birth on the scene, old hags step- 
ping into it, and wandering children adream on 
eternity. 

Once in my presence, and Mr. Yeats', a min- 
isterial gentleman expressed this hope in sup- 
ple, rounded oratory and was verbally trounced 
for it afterwards in Mr. Yeats' most delicate 
and biting manner. He admired the Yeats 
poetry exceedingly but he wished to see its ap- 
peal widened, and he proceeded to call the poet 
''onward and upward" to "greater tasks and 
grander glories," if I recollect his phrasing. 
Mr. Yeats declined with thanks, and quite 
rightly. The things of death, the pale purple 



36 DEPRECIATIONS 

things, are the ones that he is able to do, ex- 
ceedingly brilliantly able, and he is adequate 
to nothing else. It is not so very important 
why this is the case. It may be due to his 
Irishness, to his deep relation with the saddest 
people on the globe, who are credited, ridicu- 
lously, with being a nation of humorists, be- 
cause they possess Shaw and Moore, the most 
serious man and the simplest of our time. It 
may be because he has led a life of poetic soli- 
tude, as the poets of old are supposed to have 
done, instead of bowing to the bowl or rah- 
whooing with the mob. It may be because 
of a hundred experiences, associations and 
ties, or lack of them: but aloof from life he 
is and is destined to remain ; and his public must 
take him with that understanding. 

That they do take him — a certain public — is 
very evident. That this public is not so large 
as that of more human poets, is probable. But 
shall we not come to realize some time that the 
size of a poet's public, in the present state of 
the world, is influential mainly on his royalties, 
and on very little else? Of poets, as of proph- 
ets, It may be said that the despised of our 
time become the darlings of our children's. 



THE SHADOWY MR. YEATS 37 

And Mr. Kipling, the peerless clanger of Brit- 
tania, may be thought cheap and insig- 
nificant — except as a story writer — ^within 
fifty years! 

It is slight condemnation to declare Mr. 
Yeats a man without a message. His poems 
are messageless, and in his prose he writes big 
vaguenesses on little concrete things, as nat- 
urally as some philosophic spirits of this age 
are writing tiny thoughts upon the greatest 
questions in the world. But Mr. Yeats' mind 
remains at large whether it deals with the Celtic 
Twilight or the Celtic theatre or the twilight of 
the theatre — now that Synge is dead and Yeats 
is over forty! His is a mind that roams the 
empyrean no matter what it starts for, sprink- 
ling its path with star-dust as it goes, but never 
reaching any of the weightier planets. 

Why, indeed, should it be otherwise? He 
can never conquer the cohorts of the propa- 
gandists Shaw, Wells and the rest, though he 
may have a part of the following of the idea- 
istically elusive Galsworthy. At least he has 
the pleasure of knowing that many of the thou- 
sands who read him understand and enjoy; and 
how many more of the readers of H. G. 



38 DEPRECIATIONS 

Wells and G. B. S. enter deeply into their 
ideas, and feel and think and seriously an- 
alyse? The true public of every man is a 
petty thing today — though his readers number 
in the millions. We are not meaningful to the 
many. Demos remains undaunted, though the 
first-rate of every generation give their lives up 
trying to stifle his stupidity. Shaw laughs his 
truth out, smeared with his heart's blood, and 
the multitude laughs, too, because it is all so 
funny. Yeats sadly smiles his ecstacy upon the 
world and a few quiver while the many yawn. 
George Moore attempted to do poems like 
Mr. Yeats and failed, because he was too clever 
and too — mundane. And so did Lady Greg- 
ory with the one-act play. These failed in beau- 
ty, or rather the elusive atmosphere suggesting 
beauty, that is Mr. YeatsV chief performance. 
Lady Gregory tells all of a thing, and therefore 
nothing; Mr. Yeats, saying nought openly or 
completely, unbares a world to those who carry 
one in their heads. The great ones have done 
more than this: they have made a world out 
of their own minds and left it to us to play 
with for a thousand years: our Shakespeare 
and Milton and Balzac and Hugo and Goethe; 



THE SHADOWY MR. YEATS 39 

this they have done. Mr. Yeats is leaving us 
a land of shadows, visible to those who can see 
in the quickening twilight, a land of sweet, 
suggestive figures, and that is all that Mr. 
Yeats must do. 



GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 

A new book from Mr. Moore, and this time 
— the first, in many years — a book of criticism, 
as well as a novel, convinces us more firmlj 
than ever that, although a rolling stone gathers 
no moss it often achieves a most attractive pol- 
ish. A gossipy subtleness, a refinement of the 
commonplace is reached in ^'Hail and Farewell" 
that is quite beyond anything that even the au- 
thor of ''Memoirs of My Dead Life" has done. 

Once more, as in the work that preceded 
this, Mr. Moore exhibits himself as the British 
exemplar of the French realist-esthetes, and 
once more, like several of them, he is guilty of 
an ethical affirmation. He has declared for 
freedom of sex discussion and liberty of sex 
relation. This is his one departure from es- 
theticism. This is his one contribution to the 
attitude of his time. 

Mr. Moore's psychology is simple. Devoid 
of passion, he makes sex the key-note of his 
thought and life. Lovers speak not — they 
have better modes of expression. Only a man 
of weak desires is qualified to voice the call of 

41 



42 DEPRECIATIONS 

the body. Admirers of Mr. Moore, visiting 
Dublin — into which poor, cool city, haunted 
by both Catholic and Protestant restraint, he 
has retired from the ravages of London and 
Paris — are astonished to see his gaunt figure, 
topped by its unattractive visage and its thin 
pale hair. They wonder if this is the Lover of 
Orelay and the confessor of England's most ar- 
tistic search for lust. Where, then — they ask — 
are the writhing red lips and the fire-flashing 
eyes and the huge, muscular frame of perfect 
proportions ? They have never existed for Mr. 
Moore, any more than for such earlier attend- 
ants at the literary confessional as Rousseau, 
Flaubert or Marie Bashkirtsefif. Genuine pas- 
sion does not write about itself. It is only the 
mild but ever present appetite that goads to 
self-expression. 

Mr. Moore is a true apostle of sex. His 
religion, music and the rest are merely con- 
tributing backgrounds. As far as the expres- 
sion of ideas is concerned, sex is his one 
strength, his one originality, his one sincerity. 
The usual artist has a thousand intellectual an- 
gles from which emanate as many momentary 



GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 43 

sincerities. Every affirmation is a denial of 
something he has beHeved or something he 
is later going to believe. A single truth that 
will cover all things at all times (such as the 
philosopher seeks and the religious posses- 
ses) is impossible of retention by the artistic 
mind. Only the simple can be sincere. And 
with these Mr. Moore ought always to have 
been placed. Despite Mr. Huneker, he has 
changed but little. Sex has been and is his pur- 
suit, his luxury, his stock in trade. His treat- 
ment of the topic has the emphasis of the mer- 
chant who has wares to sell. But all this is the 
logical result of the self-realization which has 
been the purpose and indulgence of his life. 

With this exception, George Moore is as bar- 
ren of ideas as Kipling or Pinero. Only 
rarely do ripples come to the surface of his 
muddy pools of thought. For him, sex is the 
determining factor not only — as for novelists 
generally — at the supreme crises of life, but at 
every moment and in every mood. Passion, 
however, is not his. In Mr. Moore, the con- 
scious intellect — such as it is — moves in a cir- 
cle. His mind is the student of his senses and 
his senses are the motive power of his mind. 



44 DEPRECIATIONS 

Now it is, ridiculously, for his one unim- 
peachable contribution to contemporary 
thought that Mr. Moore has been most uni- 
versally condemned: his firm and fearless 
stand for the only freedom that he values. 
And surely if there is one condition in the 
world to-day upon the rectification of which 
the progress of mankind inevitably and essen- 
tially depends, it is the vast and definite in- 
equality between man and woman, with all 
the palpable insincerities and inconsistencies 
which this entails. 

Mr, Moore has observed this in the same 
way that he has noted many elements of mod- 
ern life. He has not thought about them. 
He has been too busy getting them to paper. 
So gathering a host of facts he has attained to 
only partial truth. Perhaps he has seen, but 
he has not solved. He has told, not taught. 
The pages in his books depicting the attractive- 
ness and, as it were, the morality of vice, are 
products of neither aspiring art nor salutary 
science. 

In a contentious ''Apologia" published in the 
American edition of "Memoirs of My Dead 



GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 45 

Life/' Mr. Moore defends all that he has writ- 
ten on the subject of sex. The argument is 
twofold : first, that the public is inconsistent and 
inefficient when it tries to deal with morals, 
since it determines its position without reason, 
and learns nothing from experience; and 
secondly, that such books as his own, however 
one may disapprove of them, do not incite to 
imitation in life at all — certainly far less than 
the tales of Boccaccio, the poems of Byron, or 
the plays of Shakespeare. 

This contention is curiously unreasonable, 
for it is certainly untrue that Boccaccio's 
fanciful episodes of fourteenth century Floren- 
tine nobility, taking place under conditions 
never present in contemporary life, or Byron's 
satiric poetry, or Shakespeare's scenes, sen- 
sual in expression, but rarely without spirit- 
ual uplift — it is surely untrue that these are 
influential over readers' lives. Far more so 
are the realistic reproductions of George 
Moore, done with the delicacy of semi-sincer- 
ity, unhampered by any intensity of feeling. 
Mr. Moore has learned that to fascinate read- 
ers, one must not be forceful. 



46 DEPRECIATIONS 

Yet in spite of his evident influence on the 
attitude of his public, Mr. Moore is unHkely 
to tear the world from its Christian virtues, 
for he is insufficiently positive of his own mor- 
ality. He flounders irrecoverably in the ''Apol- 
ogia." Of his two logical defenses he employs 
neither. His contention should naturally and 
obviously be either that he has created works 
of art founded on human life as he experienced 
it, truthful, but altogether free of any propa- 
gandist intent; or he should argue (and such 
a course is eminently possible) for the univer- 
sal adoption of the moral attitude suggested in 
his stories, on the ground that this represents 
a distinct improvement on that at present held 
by a majority of the race. It is certainly more 
free, more fearless and more frank than the 
American coglomeration of blank, bungling 
Comstockery and openly gross physical over- 
indulgence. Instead of hitching his chariot 
to such a planet, and making his course 
plain as the sunlight, Mr. Moore flies away 
in a cloud of chatter about the impossibility 
of having one moral code for all people or 
for all moments; and then, at the suggestion 



GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 47 

of a quoted correspondent, makes the sudden 
discovery that he has been distinctively and 
powerfully propagandist without knowing- it. 
Such action illustrates a degree of unconscious 
uncertainty which is not appropriate even in the 
supposed creative artist. Uncertainty may 
develop the imagination; but one should 
always be conscious— especially of the things 
of which one is not sure. 

George Moore is simply a gunshot at the con- 
ventions of this century. Quite well he sees 
that soul is no longer possible in our society; 
that here is the greatest moral deadness in the 
world; that neither successful nor unsuccess- 
ful, rich nor poor, learned nor ignorant, are 
immune from its devitalizing effects. Only 
those in revolt can remain spiritually pure. 
The creature of convention may lead a blame- 
less life, but he does so by chance or necessity 
or habit, not by seeking the attainment of his 
own truth. He lives not by a creed of his mak- 
ing but by one he has stolen from the multi- 
tude. 

Beyond these realizations Mr. Moore does 
not go. Of the particular he has much to say : 



.' ^'^^ 



48 DEPRECIATIONS 

of our whole society, absolutely nothing. Yet 
his revolt continues, perhaps, as Mr. Chesterton 
avers, because he has something of the Irish- 
man in him still. Bernard Shaw's suggestion 
in the appendix to Man and Superman, of a 
free society in which parenthood should be sub- 
sidized by the state, and children nurtured as 
the saviors of the world is an example of radi- 
cal yet thoroughly constructive criticism on 
this subject. In not one of his sex treatments, 
has Mr. Moore made such a constructive analy- 
sis. He is interested in intellectual develop- 
ments, as in emotional, only to estheticize 
them. Naturally he does not care that thought- 
ful contemporaries see in the approach of the 
sexes to-day a solution of the problem. A 
new universality of spirit and appreciation 
seems to be the keynote of that 20th century 
development, the manly woman — she who pos- 
sesses the historical manly qualities of cour- 
age, firmness, accomplishment and the rest. 
The highest types of manhood have never here- 
tofore been matched in the other sex, largely 
because woman's appreciation — and there- 
fore her ability — have been more limited. 
Nothing common to mankind must be lacking in 



GEORGE MOORE TflE MUNDANE 49 

the leader of men, or in the interpreter of 
people; each must be largely a woman, just as 
each must be much of the student, the hermit, 
the soldier, the policeman, artist, thief. Being 
something of all these, he is in no wise depen- 
dent upon experiencing the situations of any of 
them. Universality appears, then, as an inher- 
ent characteristic, developed by all experience, 
yet subject to no particular experience. It is 
close to the sympathy of the mother, and to the 
imagination of the poet. "All great men," said 
Thoreau, ''are essentially feminine." 

The reverse might be said of the opposite 
sex. 

To-day the old martial conception of manli- 
ness, tho altered by the commercialism of a 
hundred years, still holds its place. Yet, in 
the truest, highest sense of the term, the wom- 
anly man, having become mentally unsexed, 
having lost the prejudices and limitations of 
super-sex-consciousness, attains most -nearly 
to the universal. Indeed, the typical manly 
man of the day is generally without the 
greater manly virtues, while our most talked- 
of American, Colonel Roosevelt, is found to 



50 DEPRECIATIONS 

possess in large measure the essentially femi- 
nine characteristics of intuition, certainty and 
simplicity. That positively feminine qualities 
were present in Plato, Caesar, Shakespeare, 
Goethe, Napoleon and Whitman has long been 
recognized. 

Now woman is soaring toward the universal 
by seeking manliness. Man has approached 
the goal more rapidly and prevents her suc- 
cess by chaining her to the particular. But 
in woman's present achievement rest many 
hopes. Ridicule cannot turn her aside; stig- 
ma is ceasing to attach to her, though it is still 
as easy to stigmatize to-day as it was to crucify 
two thousand years ago. Those who are cham- 
pioning the cause of the sex at the expense of 
self are scoffed at just as those of long ago 
were slain who fought men for the sake of 
man. "It is so easy to scoff." And then those 
who follow, sorrow for the ignorance of their 
forbears. We never fail to honor rapt enthu- 
siasts — of other ages. 

The valid objection to looking to the ap- 
proach of the sexes for the solution of the tre- 
mendous sex difficulty of society lies in the 



GEORQE MOORE THE MUNDANE 51 

fact that this difficulty depends upon, is bound 
and covered by, the general economic condition 
of mankind to-day. It is economic inequality 
which constitutes the chief difference between 
the ragged, night-wandering employee of the 
sweat-shop and the diamond-decked daughter 
of her employer. The gradually solidifying 
separation of rich from poor is therefore the 
all-important problem of this generation, and 
so on some revision of the economic policy of 
the past seems to depend the adjustment of sex 
— as of almost everything else. 

To the constructive writing on this subject 
Mr. Moore, of course, adds nothing. He is no 
more constructive than inspired. The crea- 
tive portions of his latest book are descriptive 
rather than philosophical; its criticism is dis- 
cursive, not creative. There is much about 
Mr. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the Irish Move- 
ment; about travels on the Continent; and it 
is replete with the usual affaires. But all of 
this is really only a matter of clever talk. Mr. 
Moore has not, in short, the vision of the pro- 
phet, the artistry of the poet, or the depth of 
the philosopher. Upon the unawakened battle- 



52 DEPRECIATIONS 

field of sex, amid the almost universal silence, 
he blows a trumpet blast of truth. It is to be 
hoped some others may begin to think where 
he has merely shouted. 

Again and again we hear Mr. Moore termed 
a "realist," but in him we find a realism quite 
different from that to which we have been ac- 
customed. We have known the realism of 
Zola and Brieux, which may be termed ''scien- 
tific." This possesses a distinct intellectual 
and practical value. It aims fearless and force- 
ful blows at prejudice and convention. It con- 
demns the practice of secrecy concerning recog- 
nized evils. It widens the knowledge of the 
public on topics of "unmentionable" but su- 
premely important character. We have seen 
the realism of Wells and Galsworthy, which 
aims not only at special cures, but also carries 
with it an unmistakeable suggestion of general 
solution which might prompt the use of "spir- 
itual" in its characterization. Without one or 
the other element no work of realistic art can 
be very much more than an art object. This 
is what Mr. Moore's creations really are. 
Their realism, being neither scientific nor spir- 



GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 53 

itual, is what, for want of a better name, we 
must call ''esthetic/' They aim at a candid 
reproduction of the picturesque. 

In Modern Painting, Mr. Moore's most pop- 
ular critical work, he pleads guilty to the grave 
offense of having "suggested that a work of 
^vt . . . may influence a man's moral 
conduct." He then, as in the American preface 
already mentioned, proceeds upon a forceful 
denial of this thesis. Such denials constitute 
one of Mr. Moore's chief critical contentions. 
They are his only defense of his frank treat- 
ment of the sex question. Yet, of course, 
books do influence life — often more than life 
itself. Reading 'The Lovers of Orelay" may 
have perturbed the charity secretary, whom 
Mr. Moore quotes, more than meeting with 
just such an experience in life would have done. 
Even personally knowing Doris could not have 
affected this pious man so strongly. Her at- 
traction would probably have been merely an 
object of philosophical consideration. 

Mr. Moore is said to have at moments some- 
what the same directness and virility of attack 
that have spread the fame of Shaw, but in 



54 DEPRECIATION 

"Ave'' — which deals with some matter also 
treated by the latter — the onslaughts are only 
comparable with those of G. B. S. as the ex- 
ecution of a sheet of sandpaper is comparable 
with that of a plane; Mr. Shaw shaves his 
chunk off with the hardest and surest of in- 
tellectual metal ; Mr. Moore covers the surface 
more smoothly, but he is wavering and rasping. 
Only on sex is he sympathetically attuned, 
only on sex is he temperamentally effective 
and sincere. 

In the last analysis it makes little difference 
whether a writer elects to be sincere or make 
a living. He cannot really put to paper more 
or less than his own soul. It is by losing his 
soul, or giving it, that the author achieves him- 
self ultimately. And this out-pouring of his 
greatest possession is his one essential ability. 
Indeed, of what avail is it to him if he gain 
the whole world, and cannot lose his own 
soul? 

Mr. Moore has succeeded in serving us his 
soul, but our appetite remains unsatisfied. It 
is pleasing food, but slight, sterile, insignifi- 
cant. It is a soul that becomes finally neither 



GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 55 

startling nor shocking. It merely succeeds in 
telling us the expected in a whisper and shout- 
ing the subtle into our ear drums. That is what 
happens in ''Hail and Farewell/' as in every 
one of his score of other books. 

From another angle the author may remind 
us of the chariot-race stage horses, madly dash- 
ing onward without ever arriving anywhere. 
Vigor and combativeness we are given in 
plenty, but when the time comes for the curtain 
here they are, horses, chariot, and driver, just 
where they were at the beginning — or a week 
before that. The rehearsals have been carried 
to perfection; the scenery flits by, changing 
momently; but the struggle is stagecraft, even 
if horses and men are actual. We realize that 
if we return the following day we shall see pre- 
cisely the same performance. The scene shifts, 
but the spirit persists. 

It is in a spirit cooled by artistry and un- 
warmed by inspiration, that Mr. Moore has 
done his last and longest work. In a sense, it 
is nevertheless, adequate, for it is rounded and 
complete. Serious flaws in taste or construc- 
tion, such as those of which Shakespeare and 



56 DEPRECIATIONS 

Dickens have been guilty, are not for Mr. 
Moore. Bordering on the unblemished, he is 
close to insipidity. For some as yet undis- 
covered reason, adequacy is seldom inspired, 
and perfection never sublime. Those who have 
tortured us with the divine pangs of terrific 
beauty are often those who, at moments, stir 
in us a sense of incongruity and sometimes 
even of disgust. Such is the feeling caused by 
all the coarser scenes in Shakespeare's sweet- 
est comedies following close upon episodes 
fragrant with old-world fancies, or fraught 
with the shattering glory of immortal lines. 
No one in England can touch the estheticism 
of sex with so delicate and yet unswerving a 
hand as Mr. Moore. Yet are there any who 
find in his work the towering temperament, 
the dominating desire or the inexplicable 
breath-catching beauty of the master crafts- 
man? 

He has, indeed, led a vivid existence. He 
has gone ahead, unconquered, undismayed, 
writing wretched poetry, poor essays, passable 
novels, puerile plays and now he starts to gos- 
sip his way faultlessly into oblivion. He has 



GEORGE MOORE THE MUNDANE 57 

lived, a varietist, in art as in sex; and in a 
certain sense, variety is the price of life. But 
where in all his sure and subtle art, where is 
the whirl of summitless spirit? Where are 
the words shall tremble on the lips of time? 



_^ 



THE FETICH OF SINCERITY 

Most sincerity is the supreme form of sel- 
fishness. It is self culture at the expense of 
that kindly consideration for others, which is 
certainly a first principle of civilized beings, 
and to which occasional lying is essential. The 
virtue of truth is greatly like that of chastity ; 
either of them, carried to excess, becomes a 
vice. 

The only person to whom one should be 
excessively truthful is one's self, and one never 
accomplishes that because one's self is always 
the easiest to fool. If Polonius had been 
really wise he might have advised his son. To 
thine own self be true — and thou canst then be 
false to any man with impunity. 

We all lie, but we become weakened and de- 
bauched in proportion to the extent of our 
unconscious lying. And the punishment of 
most liars is not, as G. B. S. avers, that they 
cannot believe anyone else, but that they come, 
frequently, to believe themselves. Then they 
cease being creative artists and must be rele- 
gated to the region of the vicious. For lying, 

59 



60 DEPRECIATIONS 

itself, is assuredly, as Oscar Wilde proclaimed, 
an art, and creative in the highest sense. Only 
God can control facts, but man becomes God- 
like in his control of the recital of them. He is 
free in every case to assert the affirmative or 
the negative — and how little of such freedom 
we have on this earth! 

But we must be brave and hearty in our 
lying, for this, like other virtues, becomes petty 
when it is practiced by cowards. Just so a 
woman must be chaste with an "air" if she is 
to be respected by the discerning and she may 
be unchaste like a coward and still be quite 
ridiculously respectable. 

Either truth or lying must be justified by the 
circumstances. Both cannot be right for the 
same case, and we must develop a keen dis- 
crimination that will tell us which is best on 
each occasion. 

And insincerity has still another magnificent 
reason for being, because although it is a fact 
that very few of us can tell ourselves the truth, 
we are all madly anxious to obtain the truth 
from others. This leads us to demand con- 
fidences to which we are not entitled, and 
causes us to exact information of no value to 



THE FETICH OF SINCERITY 61 

US that we secure for the simple satisfaction 
of our curiosity . We crave to find out about 
our friends and their friends and even the peo- 
ple we do not know, and all their actions and 
thoughts, collectively or individually; in fact, 
most of us are immensely curious about nearly 
everything. 

Now this curiosity is an excellent attribute, 
from the subjective standpoint; it assures us 
that we are mentally alive. But from the 
standpoint of others it is just as certainly a 
very dangerous and disagreeable matter. So 
we are forced to get at all the truth we can, 
while giving out only so much as we please; 
and there is no way except by being frequently 
untruthful that we can win at the game. 

All these conditions are extremely obvious. 
We should every one of us be admitting them 
every day, were it not that sincerity has be- 
come one of the most imposing fetiches of the 
time. It is like the fixed belief that a married 
woman must be incapable of seriously liking 
any man but her husband, which persists in 
spite of the fact that all but the most naive of 
us know that not one in a hundred is men- 
tally faithful throughout a lifetime. And how 



62 DEPRECIATIONS 

disgustingly unimaginative we should become 
if we were never illicitly attracted, and if we 
remained continuously sincere! Stupidity 
would reign supreme and brilliance be no more. 

And if, indeed, despite all arguments, we 
did determine to be unequivocally truthful, 
we should immediately find that we had de- 
cided upon a course impossible of fulfillment. 
Not only are there a thousand nuances every 
day, in every mind worthy the name, that can- 
not be couched in words, but there are com- 
pletely developed thoughts that thrust them- 
selves upon one in the midst of talk, the ex- 
pression of which is rendered inapropriate and 
misleading by the context of the conversation. 
There are modifying ideas that come forward 
while one is phrasing a thought that would 
occupy coimtless hours if all of them were 
handled adequately. The moment we say a 
thing we begin to alter our viewpoint toward 
it, and our speech is quite incapable of keeping 
up with these alterations. 

So there can be no complete sincerity, how- 
ever we may wish for it, even between two 
of the most intensely intimate companions. 



THE FETICH OF SINCERITY 63 

Some thoughts are carelessly tossed aside, oth- 
ers are consciously suppressed, still others come 
forth into words deformed and scarcely to be 
recognized. And perhaps it is just as well 
that this is so, for few as there are who can 
bear the truth from their own minds, still fewer 
are there who could survive if truth were al- 
ways thrust upon them by their neighbors. 
Therefore, all hail to the kindly insincerities 
consciously chosen by self-reliant spirits for 
the welfare of their weaker brothers! 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON: DEFEND- 
ER OE THE DISCARDED 

It is never too late to mend, but it is very 
often far too late to break— especially when 
one IS dealing with the reputation of a su- 
premely successful journalist. This is more 
or less as it should be, for the fact that a 
man's work succeeds is not always a reliable 
evidence of its failure. But neither does it 
follow that because one has succeeded he has 
met with genuine success, and no successful 
man has failed more lamentably at certain 
pomts than Mr. G. K. Chesterton. 

Yet in spite of his failures (and of his suc- 
cess) many things can be said in his favor. 
His critical works have been justly and, on 
the whole, adequately praised as masterpieces 
of suggestive writing, seductive in style and 
replete with varied and spectacular allusions. 
That they are only at moments constructive (in 
the sense of flashing before us living charac- 
ters) is more than compensated for by their 
splendor of insinuation. Chesterton was as 
certain to fail in presenting a complete and 
inevitable Shaw as was Shaw himself in ex- 

65 



66 DEPRECIATIONS 

hibiting a true and virile Ibsen. For just as 
only a very superficial man can be thoroughly 
conscious of his own depths, so only a man 
of tremendous depths is able to realize an- 
other's superficialities. Chesterton writes 
about Shaw as if every mood and motion in 
his work could be resolved upon the deepest 
concepts of the latter's philosophy; and Shaw 
would have us seriously believe that Ibsen pos- 
sessed some fundamental faith to which he al- 
w^ays bore allegiance. Every great creator is 
the creature of his fancy and any criticism 
that attempts to make genius perfectly consis- 
tent must fail to achieve its aim. Chesterton's 
own greatest shortcomings might be said to be 
results of his almost absolute consistency. 

Not that his point of view has been always 
the same. In The Wild Knight, his early and 
only book of poems, is found a standpoint ut- 
terly dissimilar, to that of anything since ex- 
cept, perhaps. The Defendant, his first volume 
of essays, which may be regarded as the pro- 
duction of a transition period. With the pub- 
lication of Heretics his ideas begin to crystal- 
lize, and here is illustrated one of his saddest 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 67 

and most signal failures. For as he becomes 
surer of hmiself, as the crystalline clearness 
IS achieved, the hardness and just a touch of 
the coldness of crystal are noticeable The 
Defendant is the best of his treatises; !the 
Uickens, of his biographies; and The Napoleon 
of Notting Hill of his novels. His more re- 
cent writings are all, in the attributes which 
have won him distinction, inferior. 

Application of Mr. Chesterton's analysis of 
the Irishman, who, he believes, "could see with 
one eye that a dream was inspiring, bewitching 
or sublime, and with the other eye that after 
all It was only a dream," might readily be 
made to himself. It is because Chesterton 
never utterly loses himself, because his con- 
sciousness is always perfect, because his dream 
never for an instant seems to become his re- 
ahty, that he can never meet with wide and 
vital acceptance. His "mind distinguishes be- 
tween life and literature," and as a consequence 
his literature is without influence over others' 
lives. Mankind is swayed and steadied by the 
great half-thinkers whose hearts are lar^^er 
than their heads. Perhaps the greatest of all 
Mr. Chesterton's faults is the domination of 



68 DEPRECIATIONS 

his mind. Inspiration and self -consciousness 
are impossible bed-fellows. 

But self -consciousness, far from being op- 
posed, is surely essential to the gentle art of 
making epigrams. Chesterton tells us that 
Shaw's wit ''is never a weakness; therefore 
it is never a sense of humor." This charac- 
teristic is the very essence of cleverness, that 
twentieth century development, mothered by 
Oscar Wilde, in which Chesterton himself 
abounds. Cleverness is always fundamentally 
serious ; it has always a conscious end. Clever- 
ness is not the external exhibition of a mood; 
it is intellectually created to produce a mood. 
This is what serves to differentiate it finally 
from either wit or humor. 

Both of these latter may be, indeed gener- 
ally are, a matter of natural instinct. Seldom 
can they be consciously developed. They burst 
full-blown, from a page of serious writing, or 
leap, triumphant and irresistible, into an un- 
welcoming discourse. Cleverness, on the other 
hand, is almost altogether a matter of develop- 
ment, of careful and tireless training, the 
product of watchful nurture. It depends for 
its very being upon absolute and unwavering 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 69 

self -consciousness. To be clever one must al- 
ways be intellectually on the spot. To drift 
into the realm of contemplation is fatal; to 
dream is to sign the death-warrant of clever 
writing or conversation. Cleverness, there- 
fore, can never partake of either the depths 
of thought or the heights of inspiration. This 
is the quality of which Chesterton is the great- 
est protagonist, and one of the most effective 
employers, in the world. From this aspect, his 
work is important, but imperfect; we hear the 
clanging of his mental machinery on almost 
every page. Were the product perfect, there 
would be a running ripple of laughter from 
beginning to end. 

Realizing cleverness to be a conscious ac- 
complishment, we naturally tend to expect 
some ulterior motive for which it exists. As 
employed by Shaw it persuades an unusually 
large public to accept for consideration a very 
serious thinker who, without it, would be re- 
stricted to the attention of the few. In the 
work of this writer we find a complete and 
consistent point of view toward everything in 
the world, and out of it. It is of the first im- 
portance to determine whether any such stand- 



70 DEPRECIATIONS 

point can be found in the work of Mr. Ches- 
terton. 

A review, read recently, makes the custo- 
mary assumption and may serve as an illu- 
minating example. 

"Of course this is much more than a novel"; 
says the confident reviewer ; "and while v^e are 
infinitely amused over the adventures of Mr. 
Chesterton's characters, at the same time we 
are aware that the author means to drive home 
some telling truths in regard to our ideals and 
practices." 

This is exactty what critics are always say- 
ing about Mr. Chesterton. They invariably 
assure us of the depth of meaning underlying 
his frivolity. What this is, they make not the 
slightest pretence to tell us. By nature the 
solemn critic feels it incumbent upon him to 
apologize for cleverness by reference to some 
fundamental philosophy. In the case of Mr. 
Chesterton no commentator (with the excep- 
tion of his anonymous biographer) has made 
even the slightest effort to investigate his con- 
cepts, and when we turn to the writings them- 
selves we find that he has made his ideas far 
from evident. 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 71 

One seemingly consistent point of view we 
do find in all his recent work. This, as has 
been said, was not in the least apparent in The 
Wild Knight, but it appears more or less in 
everything else up to Heretics, and very posi- 
tively in everything since. This is the spirit 
of reaction, reaction against everything that 
is new or modern or ''progressive"— he defines 
the word somewhere to include all those who 
believe in the possibility of mankind attaining 
genuine happiness through the spread of edu- 
cation and reform — but to nothing very def- 
inite or particular. He evinces, indeed, a lean- 
ing toward Catholicism, but his standpoint is 
scarcely that of a Catholic. "Back to re- 
Hgion." cries Chesterton, quite unaffectedly, 
and with great gusto, not for any especial rea- 
son, not because it is true, but because religion 
and humility are good for soul and body. Be- 
lieve in God, because this will make you fat. 
Omit modernity from your intellectual diet and 
you will remain untroubled by mental indiges- 
tion. 'Tf Christianity makes a man happy 
while his legs are being eaten by a lion," he 
speculates, "might it not make me happy while 
my legs are still attached to me and walking 



72 DEPRECIATIONS 

down the street?" This is as close to Mr. 
Chesterton's spiritual standpoint as he has per- 
mitted us to come. In the same way, he has 
written many anti-liberal manifestoes, yet his 
patrio-bellum beliefs bear no direct relation to 
the creed of either the Socialist or the Tory. 
Is he, then, what he is continually proclaim- 
ing himself, an original and constructive phil- 
osopher? In the preface to Heretics (and in 
half-a-dozen places besides) he declares: ''The 
most practical and important thing about a man 
is still his view of the universe." Apparently 
he either regards the possession of a view as 
far more essential than the expression of it, 
or else he considers the declaration that the 
universe is good or the universe is bad as a 
fair philosophic statement. To believe that 
everything is going right, or everything is go- 
ing wrong, that things have been better than 
they are, or are bound to be so in the long run 
— this, if we may judge from the writings of 
G. K. Chesterton, is to be a philosopher. Any 
fundamental relation between ideas, any gen- 
uine system such as can be traced in the work 
of any of those whom mistaken mankind has 
in the past regarded as philosophers, seems, so 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 73 

far as can be seen, entirely superfluous to this 
thinker. He contents himself with stroking the 
surface of a hundred pools of thought and 
sending up an occasional jetty of water to an 
unexpected, if futile height, thus astonishing 
both those whose intention it is to bathe 
placidly and those who have come to dive to 
the depths. Thus he places himself irrevo- 
cably among the clever critics and luminous 
litterateurs, and compels all equitable judg- 
ment of his work to be based upon its imme- 
diate artistic or utilitarian value. 

A hasty examination of any hundred of the 
disconnected, unrelated commonplaces which 
he has so successfully phrased, must prove 
convincingly that Chesterton is no philosopher. 
As an artist in journalism his now incisive, 
and now buffeting style, and his pugnacious 
and dominating method, are, of course, admir- 
able. As a moralist, his single interesting con- 
tribution is his violent and (recently) consis- 
tent opposition to progress (as defined above) 
in all its manifestations. This viewpoint, 
whatever may have been his original reasons 
for its adoption, seems to have become really 
his own, and it has brought him the firm and 



74 DEPRECIATIONS 

genuine siiport of very few who really know 
what it is. That mankind is moving forward 
to the sound of mighty, ever more inspiring 
music, is an almost undoubted fact. The ar- 
guments seem too conclusive to meet with rejec- 
tion by any one less determined to be different 
than G. K. Chesterton. 

Mr. Chesterton hails Plato as the most 
Shawesque of all men, and sees therefore no 
advance since his time. But there are a mil- 
lion men closer to Plato in the world to-day 
than were a thousand in his lifetime. Man- 
kind has not risen to the spirituality of Jesus, 
but it can not be doubted that it is nearer to it 
to-day than ever. He, like every constructive 
radical, believed in man rather than men. He 
found himself surrounded by Scribes and 
Pharisees, but he saw beyond, behind the 
shadow of the centuries, a race that would be 
noble and pure and true. This very attitude 
in ''progressives" to-day gives birth to Ches- 
terton's chief criticism of them. He is that 
most perfect example of narrow-sightedness, 
the mystic who attempts to glorify the obvi- 
ously unsatisfactory past. He imagines him- 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 75 

self (and us) confronted by but one choice: 
that between the mysticism of rehgion and the 
materialism of science — failing to realize that 
the belief in '"progress" is the most mystic 
of all religions, quite aside from its appeal to 
reason. But then, the retention of the reason- 
ing faculty restrains one's pleasure in reading 
Chesterton. It is possible to see too clearly. 
As has been said of Nietzsche, Chesterton 
understood is less suggestive to thinking than 
Chesterton misunderstood. To be appreciated, 
this Rock of Gibraltar against Radicalism 
must be seen through Mediterranean mists. 

Nothing in life or conduct or in human de- 
velopment or in art or science appeals to Ches- 
terton as really worthy of excitement. His 
fervor is devoted to a defence of the obvious — • 
and the obvious is very seldom the true. His 
fear is for the failure of the unimportant — • 
from the standpoint of most of mankind. 
Thinking humanity has become engrossed in 
what it regards as its real problems— the prob- 
lems of its regeneration. Mr. Chesterton 
achieves originality by ignoring these and as- 
suring us of the extraordinary importance of 
the simple acts of life: eating, drinking, fight- 



76 DEPRECIATIONS 

ing and marrying; and of the farthest and 
most futile flights of thinking: the thought of 
why life exists, of what follows death, of what 
or who is master over these experiences. In a 
word, he devotes himself to the glorification of 
two factors in experience; those things w^hich 
men do naturally, without thought, and those 
things which they do naturally without. ''I 
cannot understand the people who take liter- 
ature seriously," he says in All Things Con- 
sidered. He might have extended his remark 
to thinkers in every other department of ac- 
tivity. 

Mankind has become temporarily passionate 
for sensationalism. Our journals have sa- 
tiated us with a certain sort; to be effective 
to-day one must discover new subjects to sen- 
sationalize. Chesterton has accomplished this, 
not only by forcing his way further into the 
fantastic, but also by returning to the obvious, 
and therefore most neglected realms. 

Mr. McCabe and others have contended 
weightily against the Chesterton method, 
claiming that serious thoughts ought not to be 
exposed except in solemn raimant; still others, 
scenting an antagonism to their progressive no- 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 77 

tions, have violently attacked his "theories.'* 
We cannot for a moment lend our support 
to either objection, our contention being sim- 
ply and solely that in a thoroughly charm- 
ing and adequate way, Mr. Chesterton gives 
us (in a philosophical sense) absolutely no 
theories at all. 

He is unquestionably important in his par- 
ticular field. As an ethical connoisseur of sug- 
gestive and thought-provoking power, he is 
second only to Shaw in present-day England. 
One man will read his writings with a con- 
tinually mounting desire to answer back, an- 
other with a passion to imitate; it is possible 
a unique third may be moved to equally pas- 
sionate agreement. He provokes scorn and 
hatred, love and envy ; but always thought, and 
almost always pleasure. These are the char- 
acteristics of a clever, but not of a great writer. 
He always wounds or delights the mind, but 
never the heart. He moves one intellectually, 
but never emotionally or spiritually: and this 
is the first essential of the authentic artist. 
Chesterton may tell us that emotion is the only 
valid guide, but we believe it or not as we 
please; he does not make us jeel that it is 



7^ DEPRECIATIONS 

so. In this, he agam differs radically from 
Shaw, who, not strictly a philosopher (though 
he possesses a singularly complete and well- 
defended standpoint) is, even in his criticism, 
a superb creative artist. 

In Shaw, constrained as he has forced him- 
self to be, we feel the surge of almost over- 
mastering desires, we see the supernal light of 
utterly unrealizable, and therefore supremely 
valuable, ideals. In Chesterton we are blinded 
by a burst of splendid sparks; we are never 
burned by the fires that should generate them. 

No one need contend that it is harder to be 
serious than to be clever. It may even be more 
difficult to be clever than to be humorous or 
witty. The question is chiefly whether it is 
more worth while to produce a number of vol- 
umes of somewhat labored cleverness, lit with 
an occasional beam of witticism or whimsy, 
than it is to furnish the world with a bit of 
actualized soul, a creation brilliant with the 
superbly vital and yet superhuman flame of 
inspiration. The former is what Chesterton 
has done; the latter is literature. The former 
momentarily delights a large number of peo- 
ple, just as an effective and original cartoon 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 79 

of our political situation does ; the latter quick- 
ens the blood and starts a divine passion in 
the brain of certain men and women as long 
as life lasts upon earth. 

Now it is in the creative efforts of a writer 
rather than in his criticism or biographies that 
we look for those elusive elements which so 
impress the human spirit with their depth 
and permanence that we characterize that 
in which they are contained as literature. 
In the novels of Mr. Chesterton, if anywhere, 
we should expect to find the most complete and 
perfect expression of his ideas, for in them he 
has given us absolutely nothing else. 

In neither The Napoleon of Notting Hill nor 
The Man Who Was Thursday, nor in his more 
recent book. The Ball and the Cross, can he 
possibly pretend to the drawing of a single 
character. Their pages are populated with 
name-bearing progeny whose conversation is 
very edifying and enjoyable. It would be too 
much, however, to expect us to regard these 
cleverly constructed mimes as people. They 
are wonderfully simple organisms. Intellectu- 
ally, each is infatuated with some single notion ; 
and physically, but for the antics we are told of 



80 DEPRECIATIONS 

their performing, we could be quite sure they 
did not exist. Each of the books is furnished 
with a dozen marionettes expressly built for the 
purpose of tossing ideas at the places where 
(were they men and women) their brains 
might be supposed to be. 

In plot, the volumes are ingenious beyond 
brief description. At the opening of each we 
find the author inspired by a fanciful (almost 
imaginative) notion by means of which he 
gets his figures moving at lightning speed. 
They move so rapidly, in fact, that by the end 
of the third or fourth chapter they have no 
very particular place left to go to and are 
forced back to begin the fun over again. This 
time the journey proceeds with even greater 
expedition, and the bewildered reader finds 
himself ready for a third, then a fourth, and 
(if a sufficient number of pages are to be cov- 
ered) for a fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth round 
of duplication. Finally, the originally inspired 
writer feels that something must be done to 
round up the race and so he pulls his crew into 
a conveniently located lunatic asylum (as in 
The Ball and the Cross) and the exhausted 
reader, feeling the divine appropriateness of 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 81 

the end at least, wonders how the maddest 
mortal could have supposed that because a 
well-organized adventure delighted him at first 
perusal, he should be expected to cover the 
identical ground in an infinite number of repe- 
titions. 

In all three of the novels we are always 
hearing what the characters have said and 
done — never what they thought or what they 
were. They bounce from one pose to another, 
always doing something, forever talking, but 
never seeming to accomplish anything. In 
spite of the number and vivacity of their acts, 
one feels an utter lack of consistent and neces- 
sary action. The author seems to think it 
enough to make his opinionated puppets do — 
it makes very little difference what, or how, 
so long as they keep it up. 

It is not so much a lack of reason as of 
rhythm. As manipulator, Chesterton is 
forced continually to recharge the rifle from 
which he shoots his circumstances, so that we 
get a rapid-fire succession of disconnected 
(though not dissimilar) happenings that is ex- 
tremely disconcerting. The novels are not, like 
Meredith's, "chaos illumined by flashes of 



82 DEPRECIATIONS 

lightning," but lightning almost entirely ob- 
scured in chatoic thunder clouds. Sometimes 
the blinding flame escapes in a flash ; never for 
a moment is there the life-warmth of the sun- 
light. It is much as if a gray mist were torn 
to shreds of silver by unexpected gleams. At 
their best, his splendor causes an ecstatic 
shudder to run down the spine of the 
reader, which forces upon him a wild but mo- 
mentary joy. Such flashes burn the mind into 
shape for future thinking. 

It is not the writer who thrusts upon us 
totally undreamed ideas, nor is it (as Mr. 
Chesterton insists) he who tells us what we 
have always known but never expressed, who 
usually afl:ords us pleasure; but it is that man 
w^ho suggests, as Chesterton frequently 
does, by an audacious epigram which antag- 
onizes or captivates us (in the end it makes 
little difference which), ideas which may carry 
us on to hours of unconfined contemplation. 

All of the boldest and most personal of 
Chesterton's characteristics are illustrated by 
The Ball and the Cross. A brief study of 
the story, an examination of its participants, 
and an investigation of its insignificance, re- 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 83 

veal the man at his best and at his worst. ^ 
^ Two puppets, armed with antagonistic re- 
Hgious views and with no possible opinions on, 
or connection with, anything else in the uni- 
verse, but nevertheless characterized with in- 
explicable bad humor as Scotchmen, disagree- 
ing about the virginity of the Virgin, deter- 
mine to fight each other. Both being somewhat 
more (or less) than lunatics, neither for a 
moment imagines that any genuine solution of 
their problem can possibly result from their 
duel, but their literary creator assures us from 
behind the stage that duelHng is the only nat- 
ural, logical and necessary exercise for two 
men in their position to embark upon. A 
dozen times, under the most varied and cleverly 
constructed conditions, they begin their com- 
bat, each time to be interrupted by the impres- 
sive figure of a British policeman or some 
other solid representative of respectable so- 
ciety. Each time they flee and, turning, be- 
hold the head of said policeman just rising 
over a mound or wall which always happens 
to be behind them. 

The caperings of these enthusiasts from one 
geographical position to another, along with 



84 DEPRECIATIONS 

some slight drifting from their original emo- 
tional situation, constitutes the total plot of 
the novel. Both the men (with such others 
as appear from time to time — femininity is 
practically excluded) are simply caustic 
mouthpieces of the Chestertonian entity. It 
makes little difference where this entity hap- 
pens to lodge itself, whether in Professor Lu- 
cifer, the aeronaut, or Michael, the priest, or 
Turnbull, the atheist, or Maclan, the High- 
lander, it is utterly true to its own nature: its 
expression is always precisely the same. 

The novel contains a possible ethical infer- 
ence: that men would do better to abandon 
their philosophical, sociological, ethical or 
other controversies, and realize at once that 
the existence of a Deity is the only question of 
even the slightest importance to the race, and 
that to the determination of this problem every 
energy may be most worthily devoted. This 
is the only possible teaching of the book. 
There are, as usual, occasional successful epi- 
grams, a number of suggestive paradoxes, per- 
haps even a subtly worded truth or two, but 
this is the sole large afifirmative contribution 
of the volume. 



GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 85 

In this novel, as in every other work, Ches- 
terton shows himself as a bit of a moralist and 
much of a cleverist (to coin a necessary name 
for those who take their sense of humor seri- 
ously), but as neither a philosopher nor a 
creative artist. 

How and where, then, must we classify him? 

If we must do so, let us rank him where he 
naturally and logically belongs : as a charming 
charlatan who has captured the reading world 
by writing stupidity with brilliance. 

What, indeed, are the great Chesterton 
affirmations? An approval of drink and meta- 
physics, of pugnacity and religion, from the 
pragmatic standpoint that all are healthy. On 
his negative side may be placed the denial of 
the progress of mankind toward the most per- 
fect society that the world has seen, and the 
denial of the humanitarian insistence upon 
Man rather than definite men. These are the 
fundamentals of his attitude; yet, in spite of 
them, he adores Shaw and worships Christ, 
the greatest progressive and the greatest hu- 
manitarian in History. 

Whoever has something really tremendous 
to say, may possibly be read by some people 



86 DEPRECIATION 

even if he be serious; but let him have very 
Httle of any possible consequence to say and 
yet utter it gloriously, and the public falls pros- 
trate at his feet. Notwithstanding that he 
has never created a character, Chesterton 
proved himself a good psychologist. Instead 
of wasting years in finding out whether he 
was really arriving at any ideas, he proceeded 
with unflinching vigor to the long and arduous, 
but well-recompensed, task of developing a 
means of satisfying the great literary demand 
of the day: cleverness of expression. 

The labors of half a lifetime have met with 
adequate reward, and we find him who might, 
after years of striving, have expressed a few 
trivial additions to the fund of intellectual ma- 
terial mankind is heir to, roaming the fields of 
writing, visionless and uncreative, but abun- 
dantly and brilliantly prolific. Let us furnish 
this man with an unstinted measure of enthu- 
siasm, let us be frank and fearless in our ap- 
preciation of his accomplishment, and do not 
let us belittle the glory of this by wrongly class- 
ifying it with the less interesting work of the 
thinkers and the dreamers. 



A VISIT TO G. K. C. 

Beaconsfield is the little village, forty min- 
utes out of London, where the arch cleverist 
of his age resides. Coming to it, as I did, at 
night, I saw only the glimmering station and 
the stone railway bridges, the houses near and 
far as I passed in my cab, and finally the ivy- 
netted cottage approached by stony steps 
reared beside possibly medieval, but delicate 
and thriving flower beds, in which dwell both 
the Chestertons. 

I speak quite justly of the Chestertons, Gil- 
bert Keith and Frances, his wife. A very 
famous literary personage in England has 
told me that without the one there could not 
have been the other. My visit led me to believe 
as much. 

I was left by a sprightly, possibly orthodox 
maid in a parlor hung with prints and water 
colors — good ones — and dotted with books in 
revolving cases and pretty little vases partly 
filled with flowers. But very soon came the 
tremendous person I was there to visit. 

I had expected a large man. I had been told 

87 



88 DEPRECIATIONS 

and prepared. But seeing him, I gave a little 
inward gasp. Chesterton is enormous. His 
head is massive, his hair thick, his neck fat, 
his belly capacious, and he must be six feet 
three in height. I was a pigmy in the left- 
handed grasp of a giant. I saw the right hand, 
dangling helplessly in its sling. For only a day 
or two before, the medieval gardener had left 
a medieval tub before the medieval door step 
on which the world's sublimest propagandist 
of medievalism was forced to march forth, in- 
to the open and modernity. In this case 
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and the 
broken right arm was a relic. The Weekly 
Illustrated Nezvs still gets its medieval page, 
but this is now being quite modernly dictated. 

Chesterton I found no heretic in hospitality. 
I was gathered glowingly into the larger dining 
room, and there we proceeded at once to feast- 
ing on appropriately named Benedictine and 
cigars that were no doubt called Franciscans, 
tho as they were without wrappers, I cannot 
be sure. 

We discoursed as we drank our cordial from 
appropriately capacious tumblers. 



A VISIT TO G. K. C 89 

Shall I truthfully confess to the utterance 
of ninety words from half-past eight till half- 
past ten? That surely does not impugn the 
master conversationalist's abilities. 

Chesterton is a phrase maker of rare, quick 
wit and jolly humor. You readers of him 
could have guessed it — that his talk is but a 
slightly milder literacy just as his writing is 
but a sublimated conversation. He talks well 
and much, humorously, sincerely and very tol- 
erantly. And listening to him, you realize that 
no one could possibly be a jollier, plesanter com- 
panion. 

''Even if the majority of people in a gener- 
ation get away from the normal, as they do to- 
day, we must not forget the line of conduct 
that is normal to history and the race. We 
must not take the exception and try to make the 
average live up to it." 

This is not exactly what he said — he may 
have said something clever — but this is what 
has remained in my memory as the sense of his 
speech. It struck me as an unusually excellent 
and brief expression of the real Chesterton, of 
everything that he stands for and all that he 



90 DEPRECIATIONS 

means. It could be applied to marriage, to 
government, to social intercourse and art, and 
I do not think he has expressed it quite so 
clearly elsewhere. 

''The difference between man and woman is 
responsible for almost everything that has ever 
happened," he said. "We must realize that 
when we try to make man and w^oman alike." 

That, again, suggests the value to the pio- 
neers themselves of Chesterton's eternal ques- 
tioning of progress. They must answer him 
before they can sensibly proceed. They must 
know whether they want things to happen dif- 
ferently in the future and they must try to 
know and face the vast effect on all events 
that sexual equality will have. 

For the first time I learned of Chesterton's 
expedition into the province of the graphic 
arts. He had always scribbled hobgoblins and 
gargoyles and demons on his manuscript. But 
a few years ago he prepared a bouquet of car- 
toons, political and otherwise, some of which 
were used for a tract, Hilaire Belloc's. A 
few copies of these were issued by a publisher 
and possibly some sold. He allowed me to 



A VISIT TO G. K. C 91 

take home a few of the unpubHshed pencil 
drawings and they are gloriously character- 
istic of his jollity. Mrs. Chesterton, who was 
curled up on a stool in the fireplace during 
our first three glasses, left to fetch the draw- 
ings, returned, admiring them, medievally 
wifelike and frowned when I criticised. 

Two hours with the man removes for all 
time one's allegiance to the current folly that 
Chesterton's ideas are jokes. His point of 
view may be riduculed, but his sincerity is 
anything but ridiculous. ''St. Augustine and 
the rest thought as I do, but then it wasn't 
customary to write humorously," is his ex- 
planation. 



A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 

Mr. Wells is so conscious of his fame that 
he frequently fails to sign his letters. I am not 
an autograph collector, but I was somewhat 
disturbed when I received a card neatly writ- 
ten upon and enclosed in an envelope post- 
marked ''Hampstead," with Mr. Wells' ad- 
dress stamped in raised letters within, and ap- 
parently written by him but entirely lacking 
any kind of signature. To make sure, I was 
forced to communicate with a New Yorker 
mentioned on the card who was supposed to 
have received a letter from Mr. Wells at the 
same time. 

My astonishment was somewhat less when, 
during my last day in Paris, a telegram came 
from Ireland inviting me to be at the National 
Liberal Club in London on Wednesday even- 
ing. Mrs. Wells had written to me a couple 
of times regarding the matter and so I felt 
certain that I should ask for her husband when 
I found myself under the marble archway of 
the Liberal Party's London headquarters, at- 
tacked by gorgeously dressed attendants deter- 

93 



94 DEPRECIATIONS 

mined to find out the cause of my presence 
within the sacred portals. 

Of course I started post haste for the Gare 
du Nord. I passed stormily from Boulogne 
to Folkstone, arrived wearily at Charing Cross 
and was driven to a friend's in Bedford Square, 
who possessed too much old British hospital- 
ity to hear of my going to a hotel. 

At five minutes before eight I waited in the 
visitors' room in the Liberal Club's liberal quar- 
ters in Whitehall, by the side of a heavily 
whiskered Frenchman to whom I was after- 
wards introduced. He was Mr. Davray, the 
translator of all of Mr. Wells' books. Not 
many minutes had expired, or much patience, 
when mine host arrived. We wandered up- 
wards to the dining hall and to melons and 
hors d'oeuvres and beef and ice cream, all of 
them mellowed by a sparkling Madeira. 

Wells is a little man. He is thin and so is 
his hair; his eyes are unimpressive and his 
moustache is straggly. None of the Parlia- 
mentarians about us, failing to know him, 
would have guessed the presence of England's 
greatest writer, of the one man who is pictur- 



A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 95 

ing to this age, and interpreting for all time, the 
method of thought and the progress of his 
generation. Wells it is who, better than any 
one else, is synthesizing modernity for itself. 

Well, we sat there: Davray with his great, 
impressive beard, W^ells with his measly mous- 
tache and myself — devouring the good things 
of this world, and talking of a better world to 
come. 

We all know well what Mr. Wells believes. 
He has told us so carefully himself, particu- 
larly in First and Last Things. But Wells, like 
all great personalities, is not only a creature 
of moods but a man made up of several en- 
tities, of many separate co-ordinately devel- 
oping characters, all contributing to the great 
central Liberalism that we have come to knoAV 
as the keynote of his spirit, as it was of 
William James' and is of Henri Bergson's. 
Wells embraces all the tendencies of his time 
because he tolerates them all. Motivated by a 
divine curiosity, controlled by an infinite tol- 
erance, he marches godlike where earthy angels 
fear to tread. In this, he may be, as the 
proverb says, a fool, but his foolishness is the 
foolishness of the all-wise. 



96 DEPRECIATIONS 

The career of the man represents the prog- 
ress of a personality. He started telling us 
stories that were good for ns to read. He ends 
by giving us thoughts that are good for us to 
know. When Bernard Shaw began to print his 
ideas there was almost no response. Then he 
turned to telling stories (in play form) and 
became the most talked-of figure in the English- 
speaking world. Now, once more, he is back 
at the old pedagogic work, but he retains the 
form with which he made himself the aston- 
ishment of the age. Wells has grown more 
gradually from the little man he started to be, 
up into the great figure that is his present self. 

Wells showed, even as early as 189S, by the 
production of his Select Conversations with 
an Uncle, that he had more than an inventive 
talent. But these little writings upon little 
ihemes, though clever and perspicacious, are 
limited and uncertain. They suggest the affec- 
tations of Max Beerbohm, without possessing 
the fineness of his touch; and affectations, like 
sweet pickles, should be exquisitely sugared 
and soured to be in perfect taste. 

There is but one affectation about Wells' ^'sci- 



A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 97 

entific" stories, which he published before he 
discovered his capability at characterization, 
and this is the affectation of imagination. 
There is no genuine imagination in beating out 
cleverness of the type of Dr. Moreau's Island 
or The Time Machine. They are more sub- 
tle, simpler, and better written than the sto- 
ries of Jules Verne, but only in this are they 
superior to them or to the widely circulat- 
ing tales of Nicholas Carter. The point of 
view, the inventive quality necessary for their 
construction is the same. Some people may 
define imagination so as to include the strange 
meanderings of this type of story. But such 
folk are at least compelled to admit that they 
are lacking in that important element of all 
great works of the imagination: inspiration. 
The early Wells stories are not struck forth by 
a creative hand; they are manufactured prod- 
ucts, put together piecemeal, none of them writ- 
ten in any but the calmest and most conscious 
mood. Inspiration is essentially the soaring 
of one's soul without the knowledge of one's 
mind. In the gleaming moment, the mind be- 
comes the wage-slave of the spirit, receiving in 



98 DEPRECIATIONS 

return for labor the gratifying hallucination 
of having itself done the work. 

The Wonderful Visit is the earliest Wells 
book shot with his satire and suggesting the 
imagination that is to come. Satire is like 
smoking: the real craving for it comes only in 
maturity after the sweet-pickle stage has passed 
away. Here in this book we have the glim- 
merings of a mature Wells. Explanations are 
waived; personality is emphasized. In The 
Food of the Gods the advance is unmistakable. 
Neither this nor any of his earlier ''scientific" 
stories are novels in the higher sense, for they 
are not slices of the meat of life steeped in its 
warm, red blood, but in them the Wells of 
Kipps and Love and Mr. Lewisham appears 
in embryo. 

This Wells of Kipps and Lewisham is one 
of the rarest spirits of the decade. He is 
akin to Barrie but mightier and more genuine 
than Barrie. He is a bit like W. J. Locke but 
he is deeper, more significant than Locke. In 
all three there is the same youth and gentleness, 
for all three are old enough to have learned 
youth fulness, and strong enough to be kind. 



A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 99 

The new Wells that was born with Tono- 
Bungay is carried to its natural consummation 
in ^The NewMachiavelli.'^ This is the greatest 
and the least artistic of his books. It is, in fact, 
abominably inartistic. It is the blood- full mind,' 
the burning intellect running riot — magnifi- 
cently running riot under the influence of an 
ungovernable mentality. There is no control. 
There is no attempt at control. The statesman- 
philosopher who abandons public life because of 
an extra-marital "affaire,'' is, of course, rem- 
iniscent of Wells himself. All his books are so. 
But this, and all the rest of the story, are 
merely incidental. It is his thoughts in retire- 
ment that Wells values. The book will stand 
or fall before posterity on its presentation of 
the inner consciousness of this age. 

Problems of every sort are given paragraphs 
—often chapters. Events of every sort, involv- 
ing all complexities, are dealt with possibly 
more frankly than in any other book. It is a 
sombre work but the strain of joy runs deep 
in its writing. It is the joy of him who realizes 
all the sorrows of the world. 

Much has been written of The New Machia- 
velli as a philosophical consideration of the 



100 DEPRECIATIONS 

liberal movement in contemporary England. 
But it is not from its acute political discussion 
that the book gains its most fundamental sig- 
nificance any more than it is because Tono 
Bungay brought vividly to light the methods 
of modern business that it is a book capable of 
sinking beneath the surface consciousness of 
its readers. The New Machiavelli is a sig- 
nificant novel beyond any that have appeared 
in many years. It is significant because of its 
absolute reality, of its uncompromising frank- 
ness, of its fearless truth. As the life of Rem- 
ington, the hero, progresses, every point, every 
condition, whether of early training, family re- 
lationship, scholarship, sex interests, or any- 
thing else, is discussed, pictured for the reader 
in unmistakable sincerity. 

This is is what makes The New Machia- 
velli a great book, and which stamps H. G. 
Wells as a great man — perhaps the greatest 
man in England today. Neither Thackeray nor 
Dickens, nor any novelist who has since been 
given us has been capable of this same fearless 
truth ; nor has any possessed the same vigorous 
ability to deal with practically all the questions 



A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 101 

of life and conduct in the same intellectually 
satisfying manner. 

I found myself thinking all these things as 
I sat looking at the little man — looking him 
over, one might almost say. 

On our evening together the practical and 
scientific Wells was uppermost, and, like all 
frank moderns, being interested in sex, we 
talked of it, and Wells was matter-of-fact, ex- 
traordinarily, I thought. It's all very simple 
after you get over the romance stage," he said. 
Strange words, they seemed to me, from one 
who had expressed so often the nuances, the 
variabilities of this most universal and dom- 
inant impulse. "Your American women," he 
continued, ''don't seem to know that anything 
exists below the diaphragm." It was all quite 
simple to this literateur of biological procliv- 
ities. 

Afterwards we walked up the yellow marble 
staircase to the rooms where "the party is held 
together" — presumably through receptions held 
by recently created Liberal nobleman who gen- 
erously shake hands with Commoners and lo- 
cal representatives from English rural commu- 
nities. 



102 DEPRECIATIONS 

It was all very strange: this most revolu- 
tionary of English novelists attempting to be 
"constructive" by belonging to the old-fash- 
ioned finance-dominated National "Liberal'' 
Club. All about were beefy members — the bul- 
wark of Merrie England — smoking their cigars 
and guffawing gorgeously. 

We talked of American politics and the in- 
evitable Roosevelt and both our countries' need 
of freedom from the professional politician and 
the legal type of mind "that tries to talk much 
and do nothing," to win in argument rather 
than to establish truth. We were both agreed 
that Socialism presented the only complete con- 
structive program in the world today and 
equally that Socialism was not the property of 
any party or any group: it might come any- 
how, in ways unknown or undreamed. Then 
Davray told us of the new plan of proportional 
representation in France, ten-thirty struck, and 
the evening was at an end. Davray and I 
sauntered out on the square, fronting on 
Westminster Abbey and the Gothic Towers of 
the Houses of Parliament, all of them dull and 
gloomy through a drizzling rain. Wells 



A VISIT TO H. G. WELLS 103 

went up to the room he had taken for the 
night, hoping to sleep, as he said, "the jolly 
sleep of all good Liberals." 



THE TRAGEDY OF THE FINALIST. 

Finality is the goal of the small-spirited. 
The search for it is unending, since in the 
things of life that count, it is not to be found. 
Our present century is teaching us to deal not 
in absolutes but in relativities. In the relating 
of one fact to another, in applying this to that, 
lies the solution of our problems; those ques- 
tions that require final answers we are pre- 
pared to hand on to another generation — 
twenty or a hundred generations hence. 

The small scientist, working over his mi- 
croscope, perhaps on a specimen of a genus not 
one man in ten thousand ever sees, demands 
that his experiment be perfect in result. As 
the problem enlarges, the exactness of its so- 
lution becomes less possible. And the prob- 
lems of our social life are the largest that con- 
front any of the sciences. 

We are searching in the world for a method 
of living. For the attainment of this we find it 
necessary to secure some approximate under- 
standing of our own character, of that of the 
people about us, and of the physical and mater- 
ial world at large. These are our supreme es- 

105 



106 DEPRECIATION 

sentials. Our need for them is as self-evident 
as for anything conceivable by the mind of 
man. Toward them proceeds the unthinking 
search of every groping child; they are the un- 
realized or the conscious goal of all sane hu- 
manity. 

Such understanding of one's self and other 
men and the qualities of the world is known 
to be in its very nature incomplete and relative, 
and is accepted as such. With it as a goal man 
has achieved art and science, comfort, knowl- 
edge, and all that we think of as civilization. 
But built up along with this has been the crav- 
ing for finalities, the seeking for truths that 
one might think of as essential, for existences 
that it might be imagined would never die. 

Alas, the appetite for the everlasting has 
been the damage of the ages. The effort at its 
gluttonous satisfaction has left history reeking 
with carnage, injustice and despair. The tale 
of its dogmatic onlaughts on the happiness of 
men is more dire than the combined quintes- 
sence of all tragedies conceived from ^'Oedipus" 
to "Ghosts". 

The genius of each age cried out in protest, 
but mankind rushed madly on, crushing oppon- 



THE TRAGEDY OF THE FINALIST 107 

ents of the belief in final things. Gradually 
these grew. Today they are powerful ; and now 
at last we glimpse the coming of a new mind- 
fulness for the things of this world. 

Death is the only Finalist who remains a 
master. The rest of those who assumed to in- 
form us of the birthplace of the stars and the 
destiny of oceans are quietly being left to take 
care of little children on the morning when they 
are not in school and their parents require an 
approved, convenient way of being rid of them. 
It is not a destruction ; Man is merely stepping 
aside from the fictions created by his fathers, 
neither denying nor discarding them, but 
merely concerning himself with his business: 
the increase of the joy of life for all. This 
will make use of all the energies and under- 
standing that the race can bring to it. 

Meanwhile the Finalists are stricken. No 
more armies go forth under their banners, no 
governments rise or fall at their dictation and 
life goes hurryingly forward whether they 
will or no. It is well that we should travel at 
nerve-wracking pace: we have centuries of 
wasted effort from which to recover. 



PINERO THE PUNCTILIOUS 

Neopolitan, although the most varied, is the 
least imaginative of ices; the drama, most 
complex of the arts, is also the most capable 
of exact judgment. Scarcely any angle of at- 
titude can be assumed which does not find its 
application in the theatre. 

It depends entirely upon our individual 
fancy whether we relish the inspired pugnacity 
of Shaw; the idealistic harmonies of Haupt- 
mann; the soft, sweet mysteries of the early 
plays of Maeterlinck or the perfervid powxr of 
his later ones ; the titanic rapture of Ibsen's po- 
etic dramas or the vigorous soul-tossing and 
twisting and tormenting of his social works. 

Something in us establishes inclinations and 
our responses to art are fixed by them. There 
are still those who enjoy Pinero. They pretend 
to admire him: his creation of fine phrases; 
they talk of him as a sublime technician or 
struggle to regard him as the moulder of pro- 
found human destinies. This, they say, is 
Art; not propaganda, radicalism, problem pres- 
entation, or any other substitute for the naive 
superficialities that delight them. Such folk 

109 



110 DEPRECIATIONS 

like Sudermann. For this there is, of course, 
the excuse that these two writers are of our 
time. The Zeitgeist grips them and us and 
their petty fumblings with a pretended infinite 
tweak some temporarily responsive chord in 
our souls. 

One cannot quarrel with the worshippers of 
the mediocre. After all, it is better that they 
should be given good examples of such theat- 
ric pabulum as they will swallow. But why not 
examine the flaws that are measurable by our 
common, accepted dramatic standards? 

The lines of a Pinero play are clever. Well- 
wrought spokesmen are thrown before us who 
speak in ''good, set terms." They are never at 
a loss for a word; their customary form of 
address is the epigram. Of course in the 
farces, to achieve an easy laugh, they halt; but 
with calculation and accuracy. Is wit, our 
wondrous heritage from the most serious im- 
mortals, merely this forced product of trumped 
up farce, or this equally forced comedic re- 
partee? When Pinero is not clever he is dull. 
Once in a while he is saved by the looming of a 
possible climax, then comes the conscious 



PINERO THE PUNCTILIOUS 111 

craftsmanship again, killing the chance of vig- 
orous, sincere plain dealing. 

As for the folk, a certain clamminess clings 
to even their liveliest moments. 

Shaw's Mrs. Warren defends her past; poor 
Mrs. Tanqueray is sorry for it. At the 
thought of her lost innocence she bursts into 
tears. When her stepdaughter discovers and 
identifies her she becomes ineffectually frantic. 
All this is photographic of a certain type of 
''society" puppet — a type that it is difficult to 
use for the creation of sustaining tragedy. 

Mrs. Ebbsmith flashes into the range of the 
really interesting and is backed down to the 
Pinero level by the astounding introduction of 
the mechanical religious motive. Nero burned 
Rome to achieve a theatric excitement. Pinero 
merely kills a character. 

With the help of the thoughtless and vision- 
less, Iris, Pinero has created his most perfect 
— and perfectly useless play. Snatched from 
the drawing-room, Pinero people embody the 
most disgusting attributes of those with ''ad- 
vantages," in actual life. Each year gives us a 
new play, each with an advance in reality and 
distastefulness. Finally, in Mid-Channel and 



112 DEPRECIATIONS 

The Thunderbolt conventionality has become 
so even conventionally unattractive one won- 
ders why such husbands and wives should ever 
have had the slightest desire to possess each 
other. 

What is the depth of distress in these ''trag- 
edies?" Where is the harrowing of spiritual 
vitals that stirs and strengthens? Overeating 
at an unvaried meal gives the same mild dis- 
taste. One need not go to the theatre. 

Of course the characters are "real." That 
is why they are not stirring. They conform 
to our conventional conceptions. They are so 
actual that they are commonplace, uncreative. 
Ibsen's people transcend the lifelike. They are 
all personalities. In their veins courses a su- 
per-vital fluid. They are not obvious, but true. 
In Pinero we feel the actuality and therefore 
the particularity, by instinct. That is why he 
does not influence us. That is true of every 
situation. He speaks before us, not to us. 
Each snatch from life must be judged by the 
individuality of its own conditions — and it is 
never exactly us he is picturing. Ibsen's les- 
sons are special and yet dominantly universal. 
There theatric conditions are non-essential. A 



PINERO THE PUNCTILIOUS 113 

Doll's House is a piece for every wife and every 
husband; Little Eyolf is a play for the mothers 
and fathers of the world. Before we are ready 
for judgment of a Pinero play we must recol- 
lect the country and caste which he casts. This 
intellectualizes our interest and we come to 
view his dramas, not to live them. 

What does it matter that Pinero's latest plays 
are well done in the kind of construction we 
admire today. The early ones, even as far up 
as Iris are weak even in this. The Gay Lord 
Quex is talked of as the perfect comedy, and is 
really not particularly comic. It would be a 
drama were it not for its lack of significance 
and weak, indistinctly drawn characters. 

To ruin the idea of Mid Channel by devel- 
oping it in a plot that is not inevitable; by 
means of characters that are meaningless and 
uninspiring, and some of them unnecessary; to 
distribute almost no dramatic material through 
two acts and then crowd the remaining part, 
seems scarcely less shameful than Mrs. Ebb- 
smith's bible snatching at the close of the best 
two acts Pinero ever wrote. But if one must 
have characters whose only concern in life is 



114 DEPRECIATIONS 

love-making, ideas, of course, must be tossed 
on the scrap heat. 

Pinero is the Franz Liszt of drama. His 
keen exposes of the commonplace are as ac- 
tual as folk songs. However distorted, am- 
plified, conventionalized, they remain believa- 
ble demonstrations. We never doubt their 
factitiousness. But their truth — that is an- 
other matter. To be true, one must have an 
idea, a message, a religion. One cannot sim- 
ply peck at experience. 

Mr. Arnold Bennett talks of ours as an 
age of realism. But mere reality will 
never satisfy us. The exposition of actuality is 
not creative. Zola and his like do not blast the 
watch towers of the infinite and throw open 
to our gaze the verity behind them. This inter- 
pretative demonstration is what man craves; 
he demands drama that builds as well as ex- 
poses life. A sophisticated understanding of 
life is simply a primitive intellectual necessity 
to the artist; beyond it lies a naivete of soul 
that has kept all great creators forever child- 
like and wonder-smitten. 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 

Countries and continents, like colognes, have 
their essences. They have also their nuances, 
their vagaries, their illusive qualities and their 
illusory dreams. But they possess, neverthe- 
less, certain factors that are fundamental, per- 
manent and typical. 

America has rendered typical of itself those 
two useful words that stand so often on 
either side of swinging doors: "Push" and 
"Pull." Europe, while subject to character- 
ization by no pair of monosyllables, is never- 
theless capable of as precise qualification. It 
is in the effort to render definite the manifest- 
ation of "Europeanism," in its various phases, 
as differentiated from "Americanism" that I 
have written these thumb-nail sketches. They 
are slight, suggestive and unelaborate, but 
there may be some who find in them a measure 
of truth and they are therefore offered to my 
fellow Americans without apology. 

I 

Between the Louvre and the Arc de Tri- 
omphe lies the essence of Paris, for there it is 
that the kingly gardens of the Tuileries recline, 

115 



116 DEPRECIATIONS 

there swings from north to south the royal 
Champs Elysee, and there as well are scattered 
those haunts of elegance and ugliness and vice, 
the music halls for which Paris is famed. 
What could be more grotesque than a five-min- 
ute walk from the Venus de Milo to the The- 
atre Marigny — from the contemplation of an- 
tiquity's ideal of love to modernity's conception 
of Lust? Yet this is possible in Paris. 

Paris is the most dignified and the most 
ludicrous, the gayest and the saddest city in the 
world. Great, immortal buildings; great, im- 
mortal art ; petty, stupid, ugly waste— all in one 
seething mass, making a city! It is glorious, 
beautiful, fruitless and futile, constructed 
without purpose, tending toward no end and 
yet fine and rapturous and inspired as nothing 
in America has ever been ! 

When a friend of mine in Paris was asked 
some years ago what he thought ought to be 
done with the old Palais Royale, which all read- 
ers of Dumas will so well remember, he replied, 
"Why, keep it as a hospital for the people who 
are run over every day in front of it at the end 
of the Avenue de L'Opera. They need never 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 117 

move out of it: they can buy everything they 
want in the shops underneath and they can 
live deHghtfuUy in the apartments upstairs/' 
Street accidents do not worry Paris, and old 
buildings are made useful. Watch the melee of 
cabs and buses, automobiles and business 
wagons on every avenue and you will stop won- 
dering why the population is decreasing. 

II 

Really the geographers are wrong. England 
is in London and London is Boston raised to 
the wth power. 

Imagine a country full of Bostonians! Of 
course, there are other types — as there are in 
Boston. There is Keir Hardie, M. P., for in- 
stance. There are the Celts, ranging all the 
way from Bernard Shaw and George Moore to 
William Butler Yeats. Besides that there are 
Lord Rothschild, Mrs. Pankhurst and D'Al- 
bert Chevalier. But Boston, one must not for- 
get, has its B. O. Flower and Governor Foss. 
England at heart has become a perfected, 
standardized New England. I say this advised- 
ly, for it is only in recent years that the gizzard 
has gone out of Britain. There was a time 



118 DEPRECIATIONS 

when its people ate beef, drank small beer 
(whatever that may be) and knew what they 
wanted and how to get it — or at least go about 
getting it. Now it is simply a question of more 
warships than your neighbor and trust to luck. 
As Mr. Frank Harris put it in speaking of 
King George's rehearsals, at a festive, con- 
versational luncheon to which he invited me, 
''You can't imagine William the Conqueror 
being taught how he should be crowned." 
That witty man alleges, moreover, that several 
coronets threatened to depart from the semi- 
royal heads on which they were ensconced at 
the most recent ceremony and had to be manip- 
ulated to stay on. 

Yet, the English are attractive. They have 
the attraction for us that a full blooded bull 
must have for an overworked kyute with a 
can tied on his tail that he's afraid of banging 
every time he moves. Englishmen know what 
to do. More importantly, they know (what 
few Americans even realize) what not to do. 
We are brazen in the face of Hell — and 
Heaven. The Englishman is more critical — 
of himself. He prefers not to ram his head in- 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 119 

to a wall even if he knows it isn't stone and 
that he can get through it. First he finds out, if 
he can, what's on the other side. Englishmen 
are courteous — even to "foreigners." It was 
not in England that a hostess, asking her guest 
at tea to have another cake, and receiving the 
reply,''No, thanks, I have had two already," 
answered, ''No — you've had five, but take an- 
other anyway." That could only have hap- 
pened in New York ! 

Englishmen, like Continentals, know how to 
live. Just as they seriously attempt to find out 
what to do and quite as much what not to do, 
so they determine what they want and as 
definitely what they do not want. It is not, as 
with us, continually a case of living up to some- 
one else's income. 

Englishmen hurry almost as little as Ger- 
m^ans. At five they have tea, whether they 
make a fortune or lose one, and nothing but 
a theatre engagement (or poverty) prevents 
their two-hour dinner at eight. 

There is a tale told of an Englishman (and 
not by an idiot) who, arriving in New York, 
was taken in the subway by a friend. They 



120 DEPRECIATIONS 

boarded a local, changed to an express, and re- 
turned to a local, all on the way to their des- 
tination. The return trip was made in the same 
manner, hurrying all the time and running 
most of it. ''Why," asked the ''foreigner,'' 
out of breath, "why do you run about this 
way?" "Come on," cried the New Yorker 
excitedly, "I save two minutes !" "But what," 
was the sane reply, "what do you do with the 
two minutes?" 

Who of us in America knows what he does 
with the minutes ? We have no more idea what 
we do with the dollars. We spend them, we 
waste them, we throw them away on things 
that tire us. We used to accomplish mighty 
physical things. We mastered a continent. 
We created greater wealth than had ever been 
dreamed of in the world. Now that we can- 
not keep up with the pace in accomplishment, 
we take it out in hurrying. 

Ill 

Italy is the land of love, listlessness and Last 
Suppers. ' It also possesses excellent patisserie 
and very poor railways. It has been called, 
at various times, by folk more or less imagin- 
ative or given to indigestion, "the land of art," 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 121 

''the land of history/' and "the land of pov- 
erty." 

Italy has a number of old cathedrals, which 
are left standing because their steps furnish 
suitable resting places for venders of postcards, 
who saunter forth gayly in droves from unde- 
tected corners as soon as a foreigner is found 
gazing at ''their" building. There are old wom- 
en whose backs have taken on a picturesque 
curve that one can conceive being the fashion 
in a hundred years ; there are middle-aged ipen 
who pretend to speak French for the sake of 
Americans who pretend to understand it; then 
occasionally there is a young boy who is still 
naive enough to hope to sell something because 
someone wants it. Once permit these vampires 
to come within a dozen yards and they hold 
you with their cries and vociferations. Escape 
is never afforded unless one is clever at pre- 
tending to be insane and then venders will gig- 
gle, pretend to be frightened and go away sat- 
isfied. You see it is all a matter of pretense 
everywhere in Italy. 

In purchasing anything it is necessary to 
pretend at the same time both that you admire 



122 DEPRECIATIONS 

it and that you do not wish to buy it. If the 
salesman believes you do not admire his wares 
he will never really care to sell them to you — - 
though he may try with what seems to us a 
good deal of avidity. He is always interested, 
however, in making you live up to your own 
better nature (which is favorably impressed 
with his goods) and if he succeeds he can slap 
himself on the back ethically as well as artis- 
tically. 

Love in Italy is like sand in Sahara. The 
country has been a region of romance for so 
many years that it takes it as a matter of 
course. In America w^e are afraid of love, 
in England they are ashamed of it, in Germany 
they are obsessed with it, and in Italy they are 
tired of it. Of course, the people go right on 
loving and marrying, cohabiting and procreat- 
ing, but it is simply a matter of habit. The 
prostitutes are even more business-like than 
New York's. As for the listlessness of Italy, 
that is a matter of genuine intellectual convic- 
tion. It is not really warm in Italy. Milan -in 
summer is considerably cooler than Boston, and 
even Rome rarely rivals New Orleans in dia- 
bolic temperatures. It is simply that the Ital- 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 123 

ians do not believe in our methods and man- 
ners. They eat fully and so they must give 
themselves opportunity for digestion. Their 
cathedrals and mural decorations support 
many of them and a large number of others 
make remarkable beverages and foodstuffs 
with things they pick up in the streets. I think 
comparatively few Italians admire great art, 
though all of them admire other people's admir- 
ation for it. That is a signal difference between 
most Europeans and all Americans, none of 
whom ever admire anything that they do not 
possess or are not on the way to possessing. 

Italy owns about a thousand "Last Suppers." 
Some of them are painted on walls, or ceilings 
while others are chopped up and put 
into frames. Many of them look far/better on 
post-cards than in the originals and none of 
the painters have supplied the divine assem- 
blage with any dietary superfluities. Holbein, 
with true German generosity, was quite the first 
to victual the table as he who allowed his head 
to be bathed in costly ointment would cer- 
tainly have had it. 

The great "Last Supper" of Leonardo da 



124 DEPRECIATIONS 

Vinci, the glorious composition and drawing 
of which is ardently admired by every one who 
has not seen it in the original, is in a condition 
of almost complete dissolution. Strangers 
still go out to the church of Sta. Maria Delia 
Grazia, however, and two old women are per- 
mitted to receive them, and their tips, while 
white clothed monks wander about interest- 
ingly whenever there is any excuse for doing 
so — though the da Vinci section itself is in the 
control of the Government. 

The poor live very inexpensively in Italy 
and the rich extravagantly. There are large 
private dwellings of the character of Carnegie's 
or the Vanderbilts' in New York (though not 
generally all of stone) and the best hotels serve 
perhaps the finest tables d'hote in the world. 
Life in the larger cities is not unlike that of 
London and Berlin though there is far less 
interest in intellectual pursuits. On the other 
hand, Italians are pious frivolously while Paris- 
ians and Germans are impious religiously. 

IV 

It may be said that because Germans do not 
live any longer than Americans they do not 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 125 

live so much. But, after all, one lives only as 
one is conscious of living, and we Americans 
hurry about in a condition of semi-conscious- 
ness that is not life. We have -no repose and 
therefore little thought. Our working classes 
are without leisure and our leisure classes are 
too busy searching for amusement to achieve 
happiness. 

Life to most people — or happiness in life — 
signifies simply the going from one agreeable 
sensation to another in quick and interesting 
succession. The only desires of the average 
man are "life" and luxury and love. The Ger- 
mans satisfy these interests — or lusts, if you 
must call them so. We do not. It is not that 
we crave their satisfaction the less. We do 
not satisfy our desire for life because we do 
not understand it, nor our desire for luxury 
because, being ashamed of it, we become crude 
in seeking its satisfaction, nor our desire for 
love, because that frightens us out of our wits. 

Most/ true Americans are Puritans and all 
Puritans are perverts. Their perversion con- 
sists in a super-sex-consciousness turned in 
and against itself. Just as only those greatly 



126 DEPRECIATIONS 

and emotionally inclined toward sex, adopt that 
subject as their intellectual specialty, so only 
those insanely obsessed with sex crusade 
against it. 

The intelligent German does his work calmly 
and with precision. He lives in the same man- 
ner. , He eats sufficiently and well; he rests 
two hours in the middle of the day; and he 
drinks his beer, fearlessly, quietly and in- 
offensively. There are no saloons in Germany, 
though there are beer gardens everywhere. 
Whiskey is very unpopular, and drunkenness 
exceedingly uncommon. 

V 

A glacial scene of snow and ice, stretching 
above vaporous clouds on every hand, and join- 
ing below with rocky cliffs and green hillocks 
with sheep upon them — just such a scene as one 
sees on any moderately clear day from the 
Kleme Scheidegg — is as typical of Switzer- 
land as anything, save one, could be. That one 
thing is the glass-clad dining porch of any good 
hotel in Basel or Lucerne or Interlaken, with its 
tables populated side by side, with a German 
family of six, a Frenchman and his mistress 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 127 

(or even possibly his wife!), an English bro- 
ther and sister, Russian girls out for a holiday, 
American tioiiveaitx riches bent on living up to 
their incomes, and an Italian laborer or noble- 
men — it is seldom apparent which. 

Switzerland is the land of inclusiveness and 
therefore of Democracy. One cannot remain 
a snob eight thousand feet above sea level, when 
one's head is buzzing and one's nose threatens 
a hemorrhage. Just as little can one ''slight" 
one's neighbor when the latter is some sort of 
European linguist while oneself is struggling 
with forgotten German genders and a never 
learned vocabulary of French. English is 
understood — but vaguely, doubtfully, and quite 
above all, most expensively. Let anyone be 
known as an American and his room rent goes 
up two francs, while tips that would have 
been accepted smilingly, with thanks, are 
scornfully pocketed with evident dissatis- 
faction. 

It is a curse for any but the rich to be Amer- 
icans in Switzerland. German and French 
lend themselves to vociferous objection — ''Doii- 
nerzvetter" or ''Fils d'un chien" sound con- 
vincing — but English is for apologetic, tern- 



^^^ DEPRECIATIONS 

perate acceptance only. He who rebukes a 
cabman in New Yorkese is laughed at— or 
growled upon. A foreign language, well- 
spoken, deducts twenty per cent from one's ex- 
penses. 

There are Kursaals in Switzerland that may 
remind those who have been there of Monte 
Carlo. For a couple of francs one can see gam- 
ing tables and listen to mild lewdness and poor 
music. There are the cries of 'Tait le jeu, 
messieurs/' the raking of the spoils; the 
watchers, bored but slyly observant; the money 
changers, the crowds of every sort and nation- 
ality, the rolling balls, the lights, but none of 
the sorrow and the tragedy of the great gam- 
bling centers. One enjoys the ineffable sensa- 
tion of being wicked for a franc ! Five francs is 
the limit and few are wild enough to play it. 
Then for those who prefer to spend, rather 
than lose, money there are the French musical 
comedies with their laughable indecenc}^ their 
picturesque costumes, their golden haired girls 
and pleasing dearth of chorus men— com- 
pared to our New York pandering to the mat- 
inee girl. Do we not show by the presence of 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 129 

these droves of males upon the American musi- 
cal comedy stage more than by anything else, 
the American's subservience to woman? 
European men please themselves; they spend 
their own money with their wives (instead of 
working ^themselves to death for them), they 
cat well and quietly, smoke when they please 
and drink in moderation — none of which pre- 
vents a great many of them^from believing in 
woman's right to equality and none of which 
prevents them from retaining their women's 
respect, consideration and love. ^ 

VI 

Paris and London are cities that have per- 
sonalities. Berlin would have had if the Kai- 
ser had not tampered with its development 
in his attempt to create a second Paris. The 
''gaiety" of Berlin is a weighty, conscious af- 
fair like the gaiety of an elephant who has 
been living with baboons. 

New York, too, may possess jts deeply per- 
sonal factor. The poets have written of its 
clanging elevated railways, its roaring subways, 
its dazzling skyscrapers, its dirt, delightful- 



130 DEPRECIATIONS 

ness, commerce, wealth and poverty. But the 
European capitals are like the European char- 
acter: they are established, settled, and un- 
changing. The German is dull, studious and 
effective; the Frenchman sprightly, faithless 
and negligent; the Englishmen courteous, 
cold and egotistic. London is cold, Paris is 
hot; London is busy and preoccupied, Paris is 
lustful, listless and loquacious. 

London streets are a mass of busses ; London 
theatres a mass of shirt bosoms and London 
clubs a mass of yawns. Business is more re- 
poseful in Paris than society is in London. 
Both are a bore in Berlin. 

It is difficult to describe what makes the 
Englishman cry "Dear old London!" when he 
comes in at Paddington — but he means it. If 
it is evening, he sees the lights, lights, lights 
on every side along the streets, the moving- 
trams and the dashing busses, the dim, grey, 
governmental buildings and the respectful 
poor. In the daylight all is quick with life — 
and without hurry. 

There are those who dislike the commercial 
quality of London, who detest the miles of 
streets lined with small shops. But business 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 131 

in London has an inoffensive air; it does not 
intrude itself, and there are other things. 
Every few streets, in the midst of the petty 
everyday, is some huge building, redolent with 
history: Westminster Abbey, the Houses of 
Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the British 
Museum and the National Gallery are only the 
most important and impressive of a hundred. 
You cannot find such in America. Nor have 
we the pretty little squares that crop up every- 
where, with their inevitable trees and grass 
and flower beds. 

Paris, in sunny France, is not so green. 
Paris has not the touch of the ''Beyond." Like 
the French themselves it is sprightly and ob- 
vious, with little reserve power. Shudder once 
or twice at the impressiveness of the Louvre, 
give a dozen hours' interest to Notre Dame and 
the Pantheon, see three pictures in the Lux- 
embourg, walk in the Bois, the Avenue de 
rOpera and the Quartier, and Paris is a mys- 
tery made manifest. There is something of 
the infinite in London; something of the eter- 
nal, of the universal and the inexpressible. 

VII 

The churches, like the other amusements of 



132 DEPRECIATIONS 

Europe, differ considerably one from another. 
In Paris, they are generally places whither one 
comes to pray and whence one goes to scoff. 

The small Paris churches have a greater 
number of grotesque figures of the Virgin than 
an imaginative American could have conceived 
existent in the world. Some have blue gowns 
and red noses, others are clothed in golden 
raiment fit for the Bal Bullier. 

In London and Berlin, where churches are 
free and Protestant, the people go in greater 
numbers to the theatres, operas and concerts. 
That may be a reason for the excellence of 
German music and English stage-management. 
Not that the Munich level is everywhere pre- 
served in Germany: in Frankfurt one can see 
as bad a performance of Italian opera as one 
pleases. Nor are the theatres of London run 
upon the level of the Kingsway, where that ex- 
traordinary master of finesse in dialog and in- 
terpretation, Granville Barker, holds hour- 
long discussions with his casts during time 
that is generally spent by directors in howling 
out commands. Not another manager any- 
where could have given "Fanny's First Play" 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 133 

as London had it for a year and a half, nor 
has anyone produced "The Winter's Tale," as 
it appeared in England a season later. But one 
can see an average play handled with thor- 
ough adequacy any night in London, while in 
New York one must often choose to see a bet- 
ter play miserably murdered. In Berlin at the 
Kleines or Deutches Theaters or several others, 
one sees excellent work excellently done. It 
is, I suppose, because the middle class, omitting 
hurry from its program, has time not only to 
eat and drink beer, but also to think, read and 
develop good taste. 

VIII 

Abroad vice stalks abroad. Here we sup- 
pose most other people live quite virtuously. 
We are perfectly aware that we ourselves have 
our occasional glasses of beer, that we puff 
our sustaining pipes, but we don't tell others 
much about what we do or believe for fear of 
hurting them and their opinion of us. 

Continental Europe looks at these things 
quite differently. There it is not considered 
(juite the same offense for a man and a woman 
to seek happiness together without consulting 



134 DEPRECIATIONS 

a minister or magistrate, as for a man to stran- 
gle his brother, poison his mother and shoot 
the policeman who comes to arrest him. As 
Dr. W. J. Robinson put it : ''We in America are 
continually confusing vice with crime." Euro- 
peans are in advance of us in realizing the dif- 
ference. 

There is, I suppose, less drunkeness in 
Switzerland than in any other country on 
earth. But Switzerland is far from being a 
Prohibition state, for drinking there is almost 
universal. The secret is simply that in Swit- 
zerland light, slight intoxicants are much en- 
couraged and sparingly taxed, and so the peo- 
ple feel no need for the expensive, heavily tar- 
iffed whiskey, brandy and gin. Likewise, in 
Switzerland, perversions of our natural in- 
stincts exist to but a very limited extent, though 
of laws against them there are none. 

Our total failure to cope with the drinking 
problem in the United States, Germany's total 
failure, by means of barbarous laws, to solve 
its sex difficulties, must convince us at last that 
man's most intimate and individual desires 
cannot be curbed or broken by governmental 
action. The Germans have learned this and 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 135 

their laws will be repealed. We ourselves must 
soon view serious public need, as the only jus- 
tification of state interference with individual 
freedom. 

IX 
I sat on the deck of a great German liner, 
and I was filled with the essence of a hundred 
colorful experiences in six European countries, 
and mellowed, perhaps a little saddened, by the 
perfect calm of the sealife with its lack of let- 
ters, telephones, subways, clocks, dirt, and 
business thoughts. There I wrote these rough 
hewn stanzas: 

We move so tenderly 

Across the sea 

That surely God can scarcely hear. 

Back from our bow 

We toss the great blue ocean 

So calmly, quietly, that now 

With scarce a motion 

The foam becomes a cloud 

Wrapping our stern up in a trembling shroud. 

There is no fear, 



136 DEPRECIATIONS 

For all is calm, warm blue 

Ensheathed in some 

Strange, warm, yet greying sunlight. 

So little motion is there in the sea 

That from us, too. 

Activity, ambition, hate and passion flee, 

Our spirits soar 

And we become 

Half less than men, half more. 

It had been a fascinating trip and joyfully 
I recalled the mighty moments of which every 
fine experience is composed, as I sat in the 
centre of my three deck-chairs, two of them 
heaped high with books and manuscript. The 
homeward travel was contributing its share of 
pleasure, particularly in its possibilities of ac- 
quaintance with characters typical, I suppose, 
of all ocean voyages, but interesting no less. 

There was quaint young Miss French of an 
exotic type so very different in Americans from 
its evidence in European women. With us it 
is queerly often chained to Puritanism, and 
very seldom visualized in vice. Often, in both 
cases, it is the effect of a too unmixed ancestry. 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 137 

but here it seldom represents an effort at ar- 
tistic living. 

Americans rarely live literature and that is 
one of the reasons our books are so bad. We 
do not believe our authors ; we look to them for 
amusement or information but never for judg- 
ments. Therefore it is that our feminine ex- 
otics, although fine and gentle, are neither sub- 
tle nor artistic. 

So it was that these primary, appropriate 
characteristics were not to be found in Ferle 
French. With an instinct for individuality, 
she was prevented by fear and training and 
inheritance from developing more than a sem- 
blance of it. There were in her consciousness 
her parents' obviously frequent warnings 
against "experience"; the training of a ''fin- 
ishing school" — one of those institutions w^hich 
complete, not the education of their attendants, 
but their possibility of education — and the in- 
heritance of a good American ancestry. There 
is so much of the negative in such a type that 
it rarely resorts to resistance against environ- 
ment. Miss French's mind might carry her to 
pastures new, to fresh associations and ideas 
and undreamed possibilities, but there would 



138 DEPRECIATIONS 

always be the long arm, not of coincidence, but 
of convention, to restrain her. American ex- 
otic girls are almost always so: there is not in 
them the necessity for self-expression that 
makes some European women able to establish 
themselves as imaginative realists in the midst 
of our world of unimaginative romanticists. 
Instinct and power are completely dissevered. 
Among the other passengers I discovered 
Mrs. Schumann, who appeared morning and 
evening in another startling gown, but always 
together with the same well-known and im- 
pressive German. Knowing that they were not 
related, all the passengers attended to them 
and conversed about them. As was proper, 
Mrs. Schumann proved to be the sublimation 
of the dilettante: in touch with painting, music 
and the drama, but deeply touched by none. 
Her gowns were art objects. Her coiffure 
was a work of art. Her mind, as I have said 
of George Moore's, was the student of her 
senses and her senses were the motive power 
of her mind. Never commonplace, never fun- 
damental, always interested, but with a mild 
skepticism, she cared for beauty without al- 
lowing it to act quite as a motive power or 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 139 

granting it a prime significance. I asked if she 
had written anything. ''Stories, once or 
twice," I was informed, 'T do not like most 
poetry; I am too real." But there was in- 
sufficient power of expression and not the will- 
ingness to labor. Life was enough, and life 
to her was clear and clever prose; it w^as un- 
necessary for her to write in either form. 

The commonplace types offered themselves 
for inspection — and attention : teachers out for 
their first great holiday; business men, always 
true to their trade, even in a week of enforced 
idleness; college girls, masculinized and ath- 
letic, but as ineft'ectual as the women of earlier 
generations — all the fatuous world of medioc- 
rity, unenlivened, uninspired by the vastness, 
the calmness, the sunniness, the eternal glory 
of being afloat on a vacant water-world. 

I turned back thoughtfully to my visits to 
resplendent feminae of the old world. 

There was dark vibrant Hortense, whom I 
found in S\fitzerland — a brown bundle of ar- 
tistic genius wandering across Europe with a 
kindly old mother, who gave her no chance 
for activity. Mistress of three languages, she 
was conversationally starved. Powerful with 



140 DEPRECIATIONS 

pencil and brush, she had been kept from work 
to entertain her parent, and confined to the po- 
Hte, extravagant inanities, first in BerHn, then 
on the Riviera, now in Switzerland. I came, 
and we feasted intellectually together for three 
entire days. I have never talked so much. 
We played upon each other's mental pianos 
whole symphonies of chatter about all things 
imaginable: art and literature and politics and 
personalities and problems and the inevitable 
Sex. I think we Americans talk more of sex 
than any nation on the earth; abroad they are 
less afraid of it and so they have better means 
of expression. 

In London, I had left Deidre and Maire, 
lovely goddesses from over the Irish Sea. 
Deidre, despite her name with its centuries of 
sorrowful associations, was a gladsome Irish 
lassie, sunny and brave, with a bit of religion 
and traditionalism to mellow her. Maire was 
a keen mind set behind a rarely lovely physiog- 
nomy. She thought, quite interestingly, that 
women often respond to our male emotional 
demands in order to gain the fruits of men's 
mentality. Her mind was analytic and she 
craved men's syntheses so that she could dis- 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 141 

sect them. That is why, more than for any 
other reason, Maire was not great in her art 
of acting. She understood her parts so well 
she could never be hypnotized by them. The 
dramatist's must be a conscious intellect, but 
the actor fails unless he is much of the mvs- 

ml 

tic. 

X 

Because the working class in Germany is 
without dignity the upper classes are brilliant 
with formalities. The differentiation is ex- 
treme. The poor, for example, never hesitate 
to accept tips. Even conductors are glad to 
have an extra Pfennig with your fare. The 
man who enlightens you about locations pock- 
ets with calmness any little trifle you are good 
enough to bestow\ Only the porters and 
Gepaecktraeger frown and vociferously remon- 
strate if you give them too little. 

But the rich — the official classes — they are 
glorious ! When you visit a German govern- 
ment official, your card is handed through three 
porters, and you yourself through as many 
doorways. Finally you come into the benign 
presence and a portrait of the Emperor glares 
superciliously at your crude Americanism. 



142 DEPRECIATIONS 

The Excellent (or perhaps only Regierungs- 
rat) bows slowly and low, offers you his hand, 
bows once more, you find yourself seated and 
the conference begins. At its end there is a 
mutual bowing, another handshake, still an- 
other bowing and ''Auf Wiedersehen." 

Fortunately, I met my most impressive Ger- 
man acquaintances under more favorable cir- 
cumstances. It would have been more than my 
American simplicity could stand to have been 
treated officially by Count von Bernstorff only 
two days from New York, even on a summer 
sea; and Professor Haeckel, being simple and 
fine and revolutionary himself, met me as an 
American comrade who needed no formality. 

Bernstorff is a diplomat of the new sort — 
school one might say, I suppose. The hour 
I met him we stood on deck watching the por- 
poises jump and dive, sail a few feet under 
water and then cut through to the surface 
again. ''One wonders why they act that way," 
said Germany's Ambassador, ''but then one 
never can tell why the porpoise jumps without 
being a porpoise." The political philosophy of 
the man was there: there must be thorough 
understanding without recrimination. He was 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 143 

critical of details in the present order, but he 
scarcely questioned its fundamentals. 

Bristling moustaches, a fine carriage and 
courtesy, yet a stiffness and brusqueness to 
some, together with the definiteness of thor- 
ough masculinity were the major apparent 
characteristics of the man. A universal kind- 
liness was not to be looked for, but neither was 
there the smooth perfection of the Disraeli 
type. Modern diplomacy is clear cut. It de- 
pends less on finesse; not so much upon doing 
things as knowing when not to do them. "Our 
young men get into trouble by talking too 
much," he said. "When we are quoted we 
have to deny everything." 

Vast silences had become the keynote of his 
conversation; eternal care, eternal vigilance 
must have been his self imposed rule of con- 
duct. 

Profess(?r Haeckel was so very different: a 
gentle, white-bearded radical, odorous with old- 
worldliness. 

We all have intimates among those pedantic 
folk who entertain their friends by choosing 
from the world's great men and women him 
or her whom they regard as the greatest sci- 



144 DEPRECIATIONS 

entist, painter, writer or sovereign in any par- 
ticular period of the world's history. We have 
probably ourselves, each of us, been asked to 
name men whom we would place among the 
unquestionably great. I attempted to do as 
much not long ago and found it quite impos- 
sible to omit the name of Haeckel from con- 
temporary science and philosophy. In the lat- 
ter field, he surely ranks with James and Berg- 
son and H. G. Wells, even though he is not so 
Hberally expressive of the special standpoint of 
our generation; as a biologist he comes close 
to Darwin and is peerless among the men of 
his own time. 

One hesitates, very properly, to make affirm- 
ations of this sort. But those of which I am 
guilty force themselves upon any of us: they 
are among those self-evident generalizations 
which are ripe for acceptance. 

Thus it is that most of us accept Haeckel as 
a tremendous figure in the modern world, and 
we accept him silently, knowing little about 
him, having read little of his work. We learn 
extensively, each year more and more, of the 
personality, of the manner of working of the 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 145 

other masters of the century: Rodin, Strauss, 
Shaw, Maeterlinck, Zuloaga and the rest. But 
Haeckel has remained deeply obscured and sev- 
ered from the world in the tiny village of Jena 
where pilgrims come once, or perhaps twice, a 
week, from anywhere across the world, to 
touch hands and consciousness with the mas- 
ter. 

Jena is a village in which we should nat- 
urally picture Haeckel: it is too quaintly old 
for a genuine modern, too filled with age-old 
atmosphere, too lacking in the obvious im- 
provements of twenty years. But Jena is a 
town wherein we can imagine a radical of the 
last generation growing from boyhood into 
manhood, marrying, settling down after trav- 
eling around the world for years, for the last 
quarter of his century of life, in the unchanged 
house where he rrtay first have dreamed of the 
vast and glittering immortalities that have 
come into his mind and have been given to the 
world. 

I was thrilled, merely to be in Jena, where 
strangely colored frame and stucco houses 
bolstered each other in little narrow streets that 
had never been altered since their Medieval 



146 DEPRECIATIONS 

birth. I lived in a hotel that had been the 
stopping place of Martin Luther, and nearby 
were the houses where Schiller and Goethe had 
dwelt. I had come for the purpose of seeing 
Haeckel; a friend had telegraphed to him and 
so we determined to go at once. Our car- 
riage drove through the market-place and 
passed a picturesque old inn where a dozen stu- 
dents in variegated caps (according to their 
fraternities) had appropriated the barmaid and 
were drinking, singing, and frolicking in the 
yard. One of them would bawl out a Grerman 
chorus now and then, but no one minded, it 
was quite the regular thing. 

When we alighted at the narrow cobbled 
lane on which Haeckel has lived for half a 
century, we were unable to find No. 7, so we 
had to inquire at No. 13. 

"Oh, sie wollen Herrn Professor Haeckel?" 
exclaimed the woman. Her voice glowed with 
a warmth that Americans, having no great 
men, seldom possess. 

Haeckel's little house is not quite altogether 
without change. Going into the hall one finds 
a resplendent, black, cast-iron stove that can 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 147 

not date back earlier than 1890, but this has 
flounced down in the midst of a hallway that 
surely has not been more than painted in half 
a century. But one gains something of the 
ancientness of spirit, to counteract the effect of 
the stove, from a ten minute walk down the nar- 
row, pebbly lane on which the house has its 
only exit. Everything but the stove is gen- 
uinely old, even to the little waiting maid who 
te]l<=i 3^ou ''Excellent wird so fort kommen" and 
climbs with you into the library where you 
spend ten minutes looking at a set of Goethe, 
a hundred or so travel books and the shelf of 
Haeckel's volumes set between flaming water 
colors that he made in biological moments in 
the tropics. There, also, you may see the 
weird, grey picture, reproduced so often all 
over the world, of Gabriel Max's missing link 
family, or whatever it is failed. It depends 
greatly upon your mood whether you take the 
three figures to be monkeys or men. No one 
can tell for certain which they more resemble. 
Haeckel came after a wait of fifteen min- 
utes. We looked at each other and were 
friends. Haeckel is seventy-eight. He is 
white-haired, white-bearded, and his blue eyes 



148 DEPRECIATIONS 

have the twinkle of one who has worked hard 
and calmly, keeping his sense of humor and yet 
not allowing it to interfere with his work. 
Only the day before he had been visited by 
an East Indian who asked permission to trans- 
late The Riddle of the Universe into Hin- 
doo and who promised the sale of a million 
copies in India — althought there had been only 
a hundred thousand sold in England. We 
talked of art and travel and Monism and "our 
friends in America who think as we do." Then, 
with difficulty, Haeckel inscribed for us a pho- 
tograph of himself standing beside the large 
orang-outang in his museum and afterwards 
I visited the museum and photographed the 
orang-outang alone. I took a few photographs 
of Haeckel at his table and desk and on his 
little second-floor piazza, and as we left the 
house I snatched a spray of elm leaves that I 
knew would be treasured by one of ''our 
friends in America." 

Haeckel is so sweet, when he hobbles in to 
meet you, that your admiration melts in 
wholesome warmth. When he takes your hand 
you may help him over to the long sofa on 
which he is forced to recline since his fall from 



JOTTINGS IN EUROPE 149 

a bookshelf a few years ago, that has made 
it impossible for him to walk alone and very 
difficult for him to work. His fine gray eyes 
glint expectantly in the center of the great 
masses of white hair that surround his face; 
and all is serene and beautiful. 

A labor of love and a love of labor seemed 
the keynotes of his life and the secret of his 
accomplishment. The great sorrow of Haeck- 
el's advancing age is that he cannot work any 
more. His personal affairs have gone ahead in 
quietness and calm; his struggle has been on 
the battlefield of ideas. And, now that the 
fight is won and he is ready to pass on to fresh 
conquests, age lays a bare white finger on his 
arm and says ''No, you have done enough. 
Rest and watch. Sit still ancf give the world 
a chance to catch up.'' 

After an hour of talk about the uni- 
verse that is still a riddle, a kindly and radiant 
farewell, you march down the pebbly lane 
while Haeckel waves from the balcony on 
which you have taken his picture. 



THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN AND THE 
TIRELESS WOMAN 

Labor is one of the keynotes of American 
life. Capital is the other. Far more than they 
do in Europe, these factors create our national 
characteristics and phenomena. Abroad there 
is a variety of Social Classes. There are the 
dukes, marquises, barons and knights. Few 
of these labor and fewer possess capital. They 
are a true leisure class. But in America our 
leisure class is the most busy. 

It is very creditable over here to be busy. 
Even an artist may be almost respectable if he 
is thoroughly occupied — this is, if he is with- 
out time for contemplation or inspiration. The 
respect in which busyness is held has created 
a nation-wide competition to accomplish a rep- 
utation for it. The leisure classes are natur- 
ally in the lead, because they have the most 
time in which to become busy. 

A generation ago, before so many men occu- 
pied themselves with the arduous labors of 
coupon-clipping and "taking care" of their es- 
tates, our women were our chief leisure class. 

151 



152 DEPRECIATIONS 

It is true that some of them darned socks, 
turned out an occasional dress for their own 
wear, bore children, did a bit of housework and 
cooking now and then, but these can scarcely 
be regarded as adequate occupations in a busy- 
world like ours. They were accomplished eas- 
ily in the sixteen waking hours and entirely 
in the home. (One hopes that no more than 
the necessary eight hours were wasted in 
sleep.) 

Today this condition is entirely altered. 
Women have become the busiest, and there- 
fore, naturally the most respected part of the 
community. They have added to their for- 
mer activities the nerve-racking and very tiring 
work of tri-weekly or often daily shopping 
tours. In these the not-to-be-overemphasized 
task of selecting suitable apparel for morning, 
afternoon, evening and night, with all acces- 
sories to match, has been thrust upon them in 
lieu of the simple difficulty of the former gen- 
eration which merely consisted in suiting the 
apparel to the pocket-book. Now this mun- 
dane and disreputable consideration of finances 
has come to be properly disregarded and only 
the questions of beauty, style, workmanship. 



THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN 153 

color-tone in relation to personality and like 
high-minded matters come up for debate. 

Similarly we have the substitution of the 
new type of dance for the old waltz and two- 
step. A generation ago women regarded danc- 
ing as a great delight and engaged in it on one 
evening or two in a week. Now dancing has 
been established, not only as one of the fine 
arts, but more especially as an important form 
of exercise. So we have it engaged in daily, 
and instead of employing the late evening 
hours, when the body is supposed to be fa- 
tigued, we have the fresh luncheon time and 
afternoon devoted to this excellent occupation. 
Time is economized by lunching right in the 
dance-hall and dancing between courses. The 
drinking of whisky, gin and the like, which is 
reputed to be an accompaniment of these 
wholesome athletics, is merely the using of a 
few slight stimulants or digestives such as are 
commonly found necessary by very active 
people. So the the dansant has become an ac- 
ceptable and revered national institution. It 
we have seized upon it with an avidity that as- 
tonishes the French, who first introduced the 
scheme, that must merely be attributed to our 



154 DEPRECIATION 

American ambition to reap the full benefit of 
an institution as soon as we have discovered 
it is good. That is what we did with our pro- 
tective tariff, and it is what we are doing with 
our ''anti-vice" crusades. 

And in this latter connection we must not 
forget our women. Speaking, agitating, start- 
ing up societies, offices, newspapers, publishing 
pamphlets, holding meetings, they have quite 
revolutionized American life and thought, as it 
relates to the one great Vice that interests them. 
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings 
Cometh truth — on this subject above all others. 
Every virgin can discuss venereal diseases and 
the statistics of prostitution are commonplaces 
of drawing-room conversation. We can easily 
imagine what labor had to be put forth to 
bring this about. 

And so it is with the vote. What men had 
come to regard as a mere incidental to smooth 
existence, a means to the end of gaining great- 
er leisure for other things, women proved to 
be a wonderful way to extreme and vigorous 
activity in and for itself. The vote became 
an end, something to fight for, die for, get 



THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN 155 

divorced for. Its significance was immediately 
felt. 

And so It is all along the line. The unim- 
portant things have sprung into prominence, 
the means have become ends, the incidentals 
are now essentials. All of which has supplied 
infinite activity to those who were supposed 
to be leisured, or at least to have no more try- 
ing tasks than being mothers and teachers, 
friends, home-makers and the like. 

Now, what has occurred on the other side? 
Man, who had come to take his vote lightly, 
to regard dancing as an occasional amusement 
for leisured evenings, and prostitution as an 
inheritance of the ages, an inevitable comple- 
ment and accompaniment of marriage, man has 
been jerked up suddenly by his supposed lesser, 
if better, half. His newspapers, his magazines, 
his drama, his clergymen and lectures all as- 
sure him that he been wasting his time. To 
what have his days been given, and his nights ? 

First of all, he has generally been taking his 
full allotment of slumber. Then, rising to a 
plentiful breakfast, he has journeyed town- 
wards at 8.30 or at 9.00 to attend to the rou- 
tine work of telephone messages, letter dictat- 



156 DEPRECIATIONS 

ing, personal interviews and the rest, broken 
conveniently at 12 or 1 by a refreshing hour 
with a friend or two at lunch. Then followed 
the more leisurely afternoon, with a pleasant 
walk, a drink or two, and the return home 
in time for dinner. Of course, during his 
busiest season, there may not have been more 
than half an hour at luncheon, and the wor- 
ries of the morning may have extended over 
into the afternoon. But they were usually 
broken by a variety of activities that rendered 
even the most irksome, interesting. 

Such is the man's life — corrresponding to 
the woman's that has been described. Neither 
is that of the very poor, for the poor of either 
sex must never be mentioned as typical of our 
great American commonwealth. They are an 
unimportant occurence, an incidental to the 
production of capital — the eighty millions of 
them — what the biologists would call a "sport," 
or a variation from type, as regards the glori- 
ous life of our excellent country. 

No, there must be no poor, and if there are 
poor, we must simply forget it. The middle 
and upper classes only are representative. 

And in these, the women are carrying the 



THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN 157 

burden of activity. They have made them- 
selves most admirably busy. They have filled 
the moments to overflowing and have fixed 
things so that when they too come home at 
night, the tiredness of their husbands shall be 
as nought compared with their own. So, very 
properly, the plays of the tired business man 
are passing out of our theatres, and we have 
instead the plays of the tirelessly busy woman: 
the plays which treat of her and the subjects 
she agitates, which discuss, condemn and mor- 
alize as she discusses, condemns and moralizes 
during the day. We call it a great .moral 
awakening. 

In such an awakening can there fail to be 
benefit? One never knows. Woman will get 
the vote, as she certainly should, if it amuses 
her to have it. Woman is already able to 
smoke and drink like the veriest male. These 
habits will harm her little, for she, like her 
sons and fathers, will learn moderation with 
practice. Then also, she has achieved the free- 
dom of the mouth: she may talk as she pleases 
and be proper none the less. And that is as 
It should be; for the cure for the evils of free- 
dom is still more freedom. It is well that 



158 DEPRECIATIONS 

woman should be a bit busy, and that man 
should realize that he doesn't really work him- 
self to death for the sake of his beloved; it is 
well that the stage should abandon a few of 
its musical comedies in favor of even the stu- 
pidest sex discussion, and that the pulpit should 
substitute sociology for some of the ethics that 
have no longer any weight. Whether the mil- 
lenium is coming through all of it is another 
matter. 



THE UNMARRYING MODERN MALE 

The "old bachelor" of the last generation is 
a commonplace of second-rate farces and old 
women's conversations. Mildly expressed he 
IS unpromising material for either, and impos- 
sible for literary exploitation. In fact, the 
clever have given him up even in discourse 
and so he ts gradually passing out of existence 
Untalked of types do that; just as the reverse 
occurs with types that attain widespread dis- 
cussion. It is possible, for example, that the 
army of the prostitutes will be inflated by the 
hundred recent articles and volumes dealing 
with them. 

But although the no longer interesting bach- 
elor IS ceasing, many men continue to refrain 
from marriage and the growing group that 
does so IS naturally typified in the few that 
possess definite characteristics. One realizes 
most especially, what these new bachelors are 
not. Physically they are not large-stomached 
animals with thick lips, hairless heads, pro- 
truding eyes, livid complexions, bad digestions 
and flapping hands. In other words, they have 
not the easily recognizable qualities of their 

159 



160 DEPRECIATIONS 

predecessors. Similarly this new clan is not 
fat-headed, hot-headed or pig-headed ; nor does 
it snore unduly, finger its female acquaint- 
ances, nor play cards three evenings a week. 

The motive power of this modern group is 
at the same time noble and petty, and its at- 
titude is cowardly and brave. It is fearful of 
woman and fearless of all else. It is an inter- 
esting body because it is interested in all 
things. It fears neither wealth nor poverty, 
success nor failure, but the men who make it 
up insist that whatever the result of their as- 
pirations may be, it shall be for them, for them 
as free individualities Without obligations save 
as they choose to assume them and as they are 
free to discard them again. 

Obviously such men cannot, under the pres- 
ent customs of society, publicly assume the 
positions of fathers and husbands. The mo- 
ment the marriage service is considered there 
at once looms up the vision of a host of duties 
and restrictions enforced in each case by its 
appropriate and dire penalty. Clearly as we 
may recognize the growing facility with which 
divorce may be secured and the increasing ease 
with which liasons may be consummated; 



THE UNMARRYING MODERN MALE 161 

readily as we admit the growing independence 
and individuality of the husband and wife as 
such; society is still very, very far from pro- 
viding for the man as mate and father, and 
for the woman as mate and mother, and for 
the child also, a position that may be regarded 
as primary. All are as yet secondary types, 
types without a recognized, separate, individ- 
ual purpose in life, and therefore types com- 
posed of men and women who, insofar as they 
are typical, are without encouragement or pro- 
vision for free and genuine self-expression. 

Against this condition the thoroughly mod- 
ern male unequivocally rebels. He rebels 
against the convention that prescribes that if 
he is rich he shall strive eternally to be richer 
so that his wife may fulfill each new contri- 
vance for spending ever more and more. He 
rebels against the convention which limits his 
companionship according to the abilities or 
needs or fancies of his arch companion. 
Chiefly and most deeply is his rebellion directed 
against the demand that his method of work, 
the kind and manner of his amusement, the 
time of his slumber and the nature of his food 
be dominated by another human being, no mat- 



162 DEPRECIATIONS 

ter how intimately connected with him she may- 
be. 

The struggle of the modern man is an ef- 
fort to reachieve those inherent, natural liber- 
ties without which life becomes existence and 
effort turns into the dead pursuit of an un- 
valued goal. 

These new men realize in themselves the ar- 
dent need for a freedom that once was man's 
but that he has allowed to lapse, as woman's 
position has developed from a secondary into 
a primary one. For today, however subor- 
dinate she may be as wife and mother (in that 
her own personality is not her prime concern 
in these capacities), woman as woman is rap- 
idly becoming a first-rate type. As such she 
is represented typically by the ''new woman" 
who has been so frequently discussed as to 
be almost understood. 

The new man is the member of society who 
best understands the new woman. He be- 
comes her friend and her helper; he encour- 
ages her in her self-affirmation; he interprets 
her to the rest of the world and analyses the 
half -under stood ideals that she is trying to 



THE UNMARRYING MODERN MALE 163 

express. Beyond that, his rebeUion starts, for 
he refuses to support her or her children, or 
to sacrifice to them his primary purposes as a 
human being. 

As yet the new woman continues to make 
the demands of the old-fashioned type. She 
insists that her motherhood shall be clothed 
with marriage and, in general, that support 
shall be given and sacrifice made to her. But 
since the latter demand is already lessening, 
it is likely that even the former will be some 
day relinquished, and then a perfectly free and 
fundamental equality may arise. Until then, 
the war of the sexes must remain a fact and 
the woman movement must be partial and in- 
consistent. 



THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD 

There probably is not a single person in the 
entire world who, if his time could all be spent 
in thinking and his mind were adequate to the 
solution of any problem, would not set him- 
self, sooner or later, to finding out what ex- 
pression his personality required and how that 
could most effectively be accomplished. That 
is the same as saying that about the most in- 
teresting question for all the world not ab- 
sorbed in burrowing for tomorrow's breakfast 
is what the world needs, individually and col- 
lectively, together with information as to how 
it has been getting at this, and how it can be 
helped to do so better in the future. 

Some men tell us that our chiefest need is 
a condition of mind and body presumed to be 
appropriate for life in a universe other than 
that of our only assured existence; although 
the army of these is not so great or stern to- 
day as in some earlier centuries. These ana- 
chronistic folk need not concern themselves 
with the fitness of their plan of living for the 
conditions of our lifetime since their interests 
lie confessedly beyond death. To them it is 

165 



166 DEPRECIATIONS 

rightfully more important to render men 
kings beyond the Styx than to free them from 
being slaves beside the Hudson. And so to 
the teaching of these good men, of whatever 
faith or creed, belong the modified but still per- 
sistent moralities of the ages and the handed 
down conventions that control our lives. 

But although we of the majority adhere to 
these moralities and bear with these conven- 
tions, we are not, any longer, concerned im- 
portantly with the purpose of those who gave 
these ethics to mankind. The chief intent of 
us of earthly attitude — the majority — is not 
a fitting preparation for a kingdom that is 
not of this world, but a working method for a 
democracy that is. And so it comes about 
that we shirkers of activity who devote our 
energies to thought are realizing that some of 
man's noblest, most accredited principles are 
survivals of an earlier time, inspired by a 
viewpoint totally dissimilar to our own. 

The obvious moralities, all, in fact, upon ob- 
servation prove to be the product of the early 
age of faith, when mankind tossed on the bed 
of infancy — and not a bed of roses was it, with 
the massacres and incest and the lack of com- 



THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD 167 

fort and intelligence that prevailed. Such mod- 
ifications as exist today were merely grafted on 
the teachings of the earliest prophets of all 
countries who all, peculiarly enough, taught 
quite the same moralities. The age of these 
dogmatic dictates has, most strangely, been 
accepted as an argument for their continuance 
and truth. It is as if we insisted on the pow- 
ers of the good-luck-giving swastika simply 
because it has been found everywhere since 
the dawn of history. Fortunately, however, 
the unamended acceptance of the principles has 
been confined in a measure to argument: in 
practice, an always growing portion of each 
succeeding generation has dealt with life solely 
as its own intelligence directed. 

This practice — this revolutionary non-adher- 
ence to the dogmatism of the dead — appears 
to have been responsible for every single con- 
tribution made by advancing civilization. 
Broadly speaking, the arts and the sciences 
have alone created the advance; and these are 
in their inmost and essential nature totally un- 
moral. The joining of all portions of man- 
kind, at first by shipping, then by railroads, 
then by cables and the telegraph and last of all 



168 DEPRECIATIONS 

by the telephone, the wireless and the aero- 
plane, all of this mighty conquest of inimical 
nature, has come down to us without relation 
to the principles of the prophets or the fussings 
of the fathers. Incidentally, certainly, some 
sciences have helped to bring about more unity 
among the species — a condition desired by the 
moralists — but the accomplishments themselves 
and the true and fundamental view^point of 
those who helped to furnish them was utterly, 
superbly separated from the wr anglings of the 
raisonneurs. 

Likewise in the perfection of the machinery 
that has given us undreamed of comforts, in 
the home, the street, the warehouse, factory, 
field and farm — all totally unmoral, all in es- 
sence quite unethical. And most of all in art ! 
Pictures, poems, stories, plays, figures in 
bronze and marble, music of dances, songs and 
symphonies — every authentic one of them 
pouring forth with the divine sweat of its crea- 
tor quite regardless of heaven and hell! Of 
course the pictures dealt with madonnas and 
magi and the poems used plentifully the name 
of the Father and the Child, but only for the 



THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD 169 

sake of the Master and the God of all, Art; 
and because the people of the world could un- 
derstand and read and see only if art expressed 
itself in those forms that regrettably obsessed 
the world. 

What did it matter in the great eternal 
march of things whether Galileo believed in 
Purgatory, or Leonardo loved his friend's 
wife, or Shakespeare was homogenic, or Lin- 
coln swore? These men had thoughts to give, 
seeds to sow, creations to hand down, all of 
them of unquestionable, palpable, self-evident 
value to the race. Naturally the prejudices 
and conventions of their times could hamper 
them, or even, in some terrible periods of his- 
tory, quite silence them, and so destroy their 
message or their gift, but fundamentally, es- 
sentially, is not their just relation to all his- 
toric faiths and all moralities the same rela- 
tion as Pegasus might be conceived as bear- 
ing to his trappings ? They could control him, 
make him fall or stumble in his flight, but 
the sublime and glory-smitten impetus came 
from another source and could not be created 
by the most elaborate and best fitting livery. 



170 DEPRECIATIONS 

So it is that the conventional, unquestioning 
morahty and mental attitude of the majority 
appears to-day peculiarly unfitted to the solu- 
tion of the great problem which the majority 
seem ready to accept as their most urgent care : 
the finding out of what the worldly purpose of 
man is and how this may be best fulfilled. It is 
not a matter of throwing over the vast virtues 
we are told to-day to value. It is not a simple 
rejection of religion or of law. Freedom to 
think is the essential: the clarifying of our 
mental processes by the removing of impeding 
prejudices from our minds — then it makes lit- 
tle difference whether or not we live according 
to their present dictates. We shall never 
achieve a world of geniuses. We can, however, 
spread the attitude of genius, the creative at- 
titude of the arts and sciences ; we can substi- 
tute this, and we must, for the conventional 
negations. Let the minds of the world be free 
and we may well believe that Life will walk 
the roads most suited to its welfare. And 
thought and faith and speculation on the fu- 
ture and the past, the desirable and the ill, will 
not be dead, but will be following as servants 



THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD 171 

in the train of Life, not clutching at its throat 
with the fingers of dogma ; while on will sweep 
the army, ever faster, through the slaveless 
kingdom that, completely and imposingly, is, 
is of this world. 



